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The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 15 faculty from Davidson College and five other Associated Colleges of the South institutions who are committed to learning and implementing new ways to improve and deepen the quality of their class discussions. Throughout the 2021-22 academic year, these faculty, who come from a wide array of disciplines, studied and discussed different deliberative pedagogy methods, shared their ideas and questions with one another, and worked 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.

Having participated in the DCI program since it was launched here at Davidson, I looked forward to putting lessons learned into practice in a classroom setting. I’ve done theatrical, debate-like experiments in the past, but with the deliberative model brings with it a whole toolkit of methods and approaches.  A good opportunity presented itself with REL 236 The Bible and Modern Moral Issues, which is by nature more topical and contemporary than any of my other courses, which tend to be historical in nature. 

The course began by looking at some issues that we think of as non-controversial: the practice of human enslavement and colonialism. Of course, back in the day, these issues were hotly debated and the Bible was brought in on both sides. We looked at the arguments pro and con, the goal being to show students that the Bible doesn’t deliver any simple message on most ethical issues, and that the phrase, “the Bible says…” is quite problematic from a hermeneutical standpoint. 

We then looked at the Bible and homosexuality.  I decided to put this at the front end of the course because I did not want to treat it as a controversial issue. If there was an LGBTQ student in the course, they shouldn’t be made to feel as if their identity was being debated. This turned out to be somewhat complicated. There were a good number of conservative Christian students in the course for whom the issue was not settled at all. For them, it was just obvious that homosexuality was wrong and that the Bible condemned it. Even ten years ago, when I last taught the course, I hadn’t encountered this dynamic and it came as a surprise. I found this illuminating: the basic facts on the ground were not as expected when it came to this issue.

I was aided in thinking about this by the chapter, “Framing and Selecting Issues,” in The Political Classroom, one of the supplementary texts for the course that members of the DeeP Collaborative also read and discussed together. That chapter gives no simple guidance, but it does provide useful concepts and examples for thinking through the decision of whether to approach an issue as controversial or not.

We spent three and a half weeks learning about and practicing the process of deliberation, focused on three issues: 1) the Bible and Judaism, 2) the Bible and the environment, and 3) the Bible and abortion. We imagined ourselves as students at the Fictional Liberal Arts Bible College of the South (FLABCOS) confronting problems and policy questions as they arose. 

For purposes of illustration, here’s the first prompt. 

A group of students at FLABCOS has started a chapter of Jews for Jesus. They’ve taken to hanging around the local synagogue on the Sabbath passing out literature and trying to engage people in conversation about Jesus. Rabbi Schneerson confronts one of the students and asks them to stop. The student responds by saying that their faith requires them to do this, quoting Acts 4:12: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” Another student brings up John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” A third student sounds a more ominous note: “it says right here in the Gospel of Matthew (27:25) that when Pilate was willing to let Jesus go, the crowd of Jews insisted that he be crucified, saying “let his blood be on us and our children!” (Mt. 27:25). But it also says in the Book of Acts (4:10-12) that God has graciously offered Jews forgiveness as long as they confess faith in Jesus. They end by referring the Rabbi to the Jews for Jesus website.  

The Rabbi sends a note to the President of FLABCOS, objecting to this student group and their aggressive approach to his congregation. He claims that FLABCOS should not be underwriting such a group (like student orgs at Davidson, the FLABCOS JFJ branch receives school money). The President of FLABCOS, Bob Johnson III, turns the issue over to the WDBS (What Does the Bible Say) Task Force.  

Your report to the president should include arguments on both sides of the issue, together with references to scripture and a policy recommendation. 

This last piece—the policy move—was one of the most helpful things tactics from the DCI experience. Ending with a joint statement or policy recommendation forces compromise and convergence. 

I conjured up a similar scenario with FLABCOS for the deliberation on environmentalism and that seemed to go well.

The deliberation on abortion coincided almost exactly with the leaked draft of the Supreme Court ruling on Hobbs and that raised the stakes considerably on that discussion. The fun fiction of FLABCOS seemed ill-suited to the gravity of the situation. We took some extra time to do additional readings to those listed in the syllabus. This deliberation was more fraught.  

At the end of the course, I had originally planned for students to take up a moral/ethical issue of their own choice, but I changed plans on hearing about an incident here on the Davidson campus. A Christian group had invited an assistant coach to address one of their meetings, but when it became clear that the coach was gay, the invitation was rescinded, because the national group of which the Davidson group was a chapter had a policy on the books that explicitly denounced same-sex sexual relations.  This led to a split within the group, with some students splitting off to form an alternative group. We took the opportunity to use this incident as the final occasion for deliberation. 

For their final project, I had students revisit the biblical materials and secondary readings we had consulted earlier in the semester and imagine themselves as a member of the Campus Community and Religious Life Committee, writing up a description of the event along with their recommendations for action, addressed to incoming president Doug Hicks. 

In general, we achieved a high level of frankness and fellow-feeling in this course, more than probably any other than I’ve taught here at Davidson in 23 years. I will definitely integrate deliberative elements into future courses.

 

The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 15 faculty from Davidson College and five other Associated Colleges of the South institutions who are committed to learning and implementing new ways to improve and deepen the quality of their class discussions. Throughout the 2021-22 academic year, these faculty, who come from a wide array of disciplines, studied and discussed different deliberative pedagogy methods, shared their ideas and questions with one another, and worked 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.

One of the main aspects of deliberation in the classroom that I have returned to and explored throughout the process of adapting Political Ecology into a deliberation course and reflecting on this process in small and large group sessions with other ACS faculty, is an embedded tension in the idea of the political classroom. This tension rests, on the one hand, on the theoretical ideal of the political classroom as a deliberative space where students can voice all perspectives—as though each is equal and valid to one another. The readings we did for our deliberative pedagogy workshop emphasized the classroom as a “political” space, one that operates in service of producing citizens who can participate in democratic life by contemplating questions about how we should, or ought, to live.

My own research, and therefore the classes that I teach, grapple with how race, gender, and class shape what gets marked and classified as “other” and in so doing can produce a myriad of oppressions and marginal communities. I focus on how expert knowledge supports and justifies the categorization of legal or criminal practice in relation to the environment, and how colonial categorizations produced environmental and social struggles with which we now grapple. 

Classrooms, as one of many spaces of knowledge transmission, are inherently political spaces, because not only do they implicitly or explicitly assert what is normal, or standard, but they do so in service of maintaining order and disciplining bodies and practices in service of the state. Answering questions of should or ought therefore requires an implicit definition of what should not or what ought not, which tends to exclude those who are from specific groups and/or practice particular actions, denying them the necessary precondition of personhood so that they cannot participate in democratic processes.

To treat a classroom as a political space where questions of how we should or ought to live are weighed in a neutral manner seemed, initially, incongruent with the understanding that “Othered” people continue to be harmed both in the classroom and in institutions of higher learning, as well as in the political sphere where they might attempt to participate in the democratic life of citizens, and therefore requires a breakdown of neutrality—at least from one of my perspectives as a scholar-activist. 

From the very beginning of DeeP, I was anxious about how I would balance and navigate this tension, how my decisions might shape the classroom deliberations, and how they might affect whether and/or how students feel included, safe, and comfortable enough to actively participate and engage with opposing, and perhaps even dehumanizing, ideas. I was committed to DeeP, however, because I do strongly believe that deliberation can serve as a means for instilling, if nothing else, a sense of empathy, connection, and care for others and therefore, it has the potential to further inclusivity and engagement in the classroom, while also producing individuals who can participate better in democratic processes. 

I attempted to address my concerns by choosing case studies that were written by scholars who were trained to understand the operations and manifestations of power, as they are shaped by and as they shape race, class, and gender and sexuality. I also did a lot of reverse engineering so that I focused on the objectives of the assignments, rather than just on the content of the case studies themselves. 

In so doing, I decided that I needed students to do the following: 1) examine and apply the theories we were learning in class that would allow them to understand processes of marginalization; 2) understand how processes of marginalization are implicated in the production of environmental harms or poor resource management practices; 3) how practices designed to bolster community participation can result in either better representation or worse representation, depending on who is “at the table”; and 4) develop well-researched stakeholder positions that are supported by the published literature, challenge their personal perspectives, and respect the complexity and nuance of stakeholder groups. 

Throughout the semester, my students consistently remarked that the deliberation role playing exercises were their favorite activities. Their engagement with the course increased significantly during these weeks and they also played their stakeholder positions out to their most logical conclusions, while also engaging with more nuanced and complex perspectives. Rather than treat their stakeholders as a homogenous block with a single perspective, they explored the at-times contradictory positions of those who might be grouped into a single stakeholder group and had to negotiate outcomes accordingly. What does it mean for an elected leader of an indigenous group to have to navigate different factions within their constituent group that are advocating for different policy options? How does one resolve the tensions between poaching and legal hunting given the colonial and racialized legacies embedded within historical and contemporary conservation practice? How might access to potable water be a human right and governed as a commodity within a market system?

Overall, I think it was a success. I still have some reservations about these tensions, but insofar as I am clear about the objectives of the assignments, as well as the specific skillsets that I want students to walk away from the class having developed, I was pleased with their progress, demonstrated learning, and engagement. I will continue to develop deliberative role-playing exercises in Political Ecology, creating a “bank” of case studies that I can draw on from year to year, and potentially, even begin to co-produce with students. I may also begin to utilize them more in my introductory core course, Environmental Social Science, as a way to begin to bridge environmental studies, policy, and critical race, class, feminist, and gender and sexuality theory.

 

The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 15 faculty from Davidson College and five other Associated Colleges of the South institutions who are committed to learning and implementing new ways to improve and deepen the quality of their class discussions. Throughout the 2021-22 academic year, these faculty, who come from a wide array of disciplines, studied and discussed different deliberative pedagogy methods, shared their ideas and questions with one another, and worked 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.

Public Health Ethics is a seminar now offered annually in the Davidson College Department of Public Health. The course is explicitly applied, endeavoring to make public health ethics relevant and accessible to students with an array of academic and other backgrounds and goals. It emphasizes praxis through case studies, with Davidson College undergraduates in mind, some of whom might not have experience with public health or public health ethics (a premise that was upended, sometimes in unexpected ways, by COVID-19).  While future public health and health professionals comprise an important audience for the class, in many ways it is those students who pursue other paths or never take another public health class that constitute its most important audience, which is part of the reason there is no prerequisite for the course. 

If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us nothing else, it is that many incompletely understand their role and stake in public health problems. Many of us, including students, particularly at the beginning, struggle with the fact that the “right” answer or course of action in public health is rarely clear or definitive, and whatever course is chosen involves trade-offs about which people may, sometimes vehemently, disagree. It can be quite shocking to some when they realize that public health is as much about considerations of values as anything else.

The fact that potential solutions to public health problems frequently require collective and sometimes controversial action, begs for more inclusive and productive forms of public health and public health education. It also calls for increased commitment to and innovation in engaging affected communities in the development, implementation, and assessment of the effects of public health policies and other interventions. Both democratic deliberation and deliberative pedagogic theory and techniques offer possible means of advancing those aims as students grapple with these issues and others’ positions in the classroom and their communities. The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Collaborative provided a structure to consider and learn more about how I might better integrate deliberative approaches in a public health ethics seminar, a course whose subject matter and case-based approach seems well-suited. 

Framing the seminar is an examination of how public health gives rise to distinct ethical issues. The ethical dilemmas related to and contentious debates about public health policy arise, in part, from key features of public health problems and the practical, conceptual, and ethical underpinnings of public health work. Public health challenges disproportionately affect marginalized and vulnerable groups and addressing them usually requires governmental action. 

Public health focuses on groups, often discordant with dominant models of the causes of and solutions to ill health, particularly in biomedicine. In addition, focus on communities or populations is part of the source of the tensions that arise between individual freedoms and public health interventions. The ideal field of action in public health is often poorly understood and met with skepticism, in its emphasis on prevention (public health successes are the problems that don’t happen); upstream causes of ill health, e.g., systemic racism; and public goods about which there may not be consensus. 

Emergencies like the 2014-2016 Ebola virus disease epidemic in west Africa and the COVID-19 pandemic make public health visible to those who do not routinely pay attention to it, skewing their perceptions, including those of policymakers. Yet such emergencies are, in essence, public health (as well as societal and global) failures, reflecting inadequate investment in and commitment to the core business of public health and its foundational ethical commitments, including those relating to security, good governance, solidarity, and justice. 

Careful considerations of these dimensions of public health emergencies is particularly important for the current iterations of the public health ethics course, as the students themselves are living through and experiencing trauma related to a global public health emergency. This can and has both dampened and heightened some students’ ability to identify and critically analyze public health ethics issues and to engage in effective deliberation.

Cases

The central work of the public health ethics seminar involves familiarizing students with ethics concepts, theoretical approaches, and frameworks, and applying them to analysis and discussion of cases. Case topics include immigrant health, public health police powers, vaccine policy, colonialism and global health, and obesity stigma, among others. Cases are drawn and adapted from varied sources including:

• H. Barrett D, W. Ortmann L, Dawson A, Saenz C, Reis A, Bolan G, editors. Public Health Ethics: Cases Spanning the Globe [Internet]. Cham (CH): Springer; 2016. PMID: 28590613. (Open access)
• Educational materials from The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (Bioethics Commission), an advisory body to President Barack Obama, where I served as Associate Director. My experience at the Bioethics Commission, and in particular my role in their work on the 2014-2016 west African Ebola virus disease epidemic, was part of the impetus for me to participate in the DeeP Collaborative. 
• The Columbia University Case Consortium
• Cases from the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics

Students participated in discussions of all cases and led two, in pairs. They had considerable latitude in how they facilitated case studies and were encouraged to be creative and incorporate deliberative and other techniques, e.g., role playing. While the questions didn’t have to take this form, they were asked to incorporate these domains:

• What is your gut reaction to the case? 
• Who are the stakeholders in this scenario? 
• What are their interests? What do they have at stake? How is the issue perceived from different perspectives? 
• What are the relevant facts/information?
• What facts/information are unknown? Why are they unknown? 
• What ethical concerns or issues are raised by this scenario? 
• What ethical issues are in tension? 
• What options are possible in this scenario? 
• What ethical concepts, tools, or frameworks are useful to help analyze the scenario? 

Lessons

I view the integration of deliberative pedagogy and the discussions from the DeeP Collaborative to be a work in progress, with initial steps and lessons learned as part of the Spring 2022 public health ethics course. Both the democratic deliberation and deliberative pedagogy materials, such as those that described public deliberative processes relating to COVID-19 policies (e.g., Scherer, Maya MPH; Kamler, Alexandra MPH; Weiss, Linda PhD; Blacksher, Erika PhD; Jeavons, Jessica JD, MA; Gold, Marthe R. MD, MPH Using Public Deliberation to Set Priorities: The Case of COVID-19 Vaccine Access in New York City, Journal of Public Health Management and Practice: January/February 2022 – Volume 28 – Issue 1 – p 86-94) were resonant for some students, reflected in their contributions to class discussions and their choice to write about deliberation as part of short writing assignments. 

Consistent with class themes, students were particularly interested in how to meaningfully include voices less likely to be highlighted in deliberative processes and the potential role of democratic deliberation in transparency, accountability, and trust, important concepts in public health ethics. We discussed how democratic deliberation and other public engagement processes can both foster and undermine trust, depending on how they are conducted, who they include, and how they relate to public health policies and action. 

The integration of deliberative approaches in student-led cases studies was incomplete. In large part, this was a result of too much material including too many cases, exacerbated by a COVID-19 shortened semester. In general, it takes time for students to become comfortable with discussing and even more so leading cases, which includes integrating initially unfamiliar and complex ethics theories, concepts, and tools as well as public health topics and methods new to them. Classes cohere in different ways, and I was impressed with how case presentation and discussion improved over time, and the deliberative material likely contributed to this in subtle ways. 

I plan to take some time to reflect on how to better highlight the deliberative material and make it more explicit in case discussions in the future. I am going to reduce the number of cases and include more structured role-playing exercises focusing on deliberation. I am appreciative most of all for the opportunity the DeeP Collaborative provided to engage with colleagues from different disciplines at Davidson College and other institutions, whose insights and experiences will undoubtedly enrich my pedagogy for years to come.

 

The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 15 faculty from Davidson College and five other Associated Colleges of the South institutions who are committed to learning and implementing new ways to improve and deepen the quality of their class discussions. Throughout the 2021-22 academic year, these faculty, who come from a wide array of disciplines, studied and discussed different deliberative pedagogy methods, shared their ideas and questions with one another, and worked 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.

Posted below is Dr. Nobis’s video blog post below about his efforts to incorporate elements of deliberative pedagogy into his Introduction to Philosophical ethics course at Morehouse College. Dr. Nobis discusses how, through the processes of deliberation, he encouraged his students to make sure they know and understand diverse perspectives on difficult ethical issues such as abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, treatment of animals, among others. Embedded below the video is the “Fair and Balanced Guide to Productive Deliberation” that he mentions in his reflections on the course.

 

A “Fair and Balanced” Guide to Deliberation_Nobis