Blog Posts

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.

Comics & Graphic Novels of Spain, SPA 332, is a course in which students examine contemporary graphic novels from Spain, paying special attention to the relationship between form and content. This literary art form is the medium through which our class interpreted key issues in Spain in the 21st century, such as how the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco’s 36-year fascist dictatorship are remembered through today’s democratic lens. How do artists and writers respond to history and contemporary culture? What do the works tell us about racism and xenophobia in Spain? About sexism, homophobia, and generational differences? About the role of memory in contemporary life, traumatic memory, and the politics of collective memory? Because the answers to these questions fall along party lines, this course seemed like an appropriate one for providing a relevant opportunity for meaningful deliberation. The course is conducted in Spanish, a language which the majority of the students have learned in an academic setting.

Overall, participation in the DeeP Collaborative was a productive and rewarding experience for my students and me. One of the greatest challenges was balancing the time required to meet the multiple Learning Outcomes. Because the course is conducted in Spanish, I needed to ensure that students had significant time building their language skills, in all skill areas including reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Reading about deliberative democracy in Spanish felt like a big ask and reading about it in English took time away from Spanish. Ultimately, we did a little bit of both, and it worked well. Because listening and speaking are at the heart of deliberation, this aspect was a good fit. 

In their reflections, students recognized the opportunity and were grateful for it. Moreover, I’ve found that students are evermore well-versed in community norms, so setting the ground rules for deliberation was something that came naturally to many of them. To those for whom this kind of social conduct had not been previously explicitly articulated, working in groups was an excellent opportunity for peer-to-peer learning. After the deliberations themselves, my students commented on the value of listening. They recognized that the deliberative process required that they respond to each other’s ideas as opposed to arguing their own positions. Candidly, I believe this was one of the most successful outcomes of the experience.

Another of the significant challenges also relates to the Learning Outcomes, specifically, the content-focused outcomes. My students were deliberating on material that was entirely unfamiliar to them. They had to gain an understanding of Spain’s history as well as of the current debate around historical memory in Spain and its political implications. Consequently, we needed to conduct the formal deliberations at the end of the semester. Students commented in their feedback that the timing was somewhat stressful. In response to this feedback, I will consider conducting the large-scale deliberations earlier in the semester, even if just by a week or two. 

On a positive note, once students gained the required understanding of the context, they were able to make connections with American cultures as well as material from other classes (e.g., trauma, human rights, civil rights, reparations). At first, the positions they were suggesting for the deliberation guides were so radical that they were not defensible enough to lend themselves to meaningful deliberation. Identifying the nuances of similar positions while simultaneously identifying irreconcilable differences was ultimately a productive and enriching exercise. Overall, my students saw great value in deliberating and were glad to have had the opportunity to participate in Spanish.

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.

Check out Dr. Vander Poppen’s video blog post below about about how he integrated deliberation into his classics course on When in Rome: Exploring Identity and Empire at Rollins College through both low-stakes mini-debates and a large-scale deliberative simulation of a major land distribution crisis in Ancient Rome.

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.

For a couple years, I gave a “First Lecture” during Southwestern University’s welcome week—the period in August where only new freshmen are living on campus—about “Talking Politics in Polarized Times.” The students who attend are asked “what worries or concerns do you have about talking politics on campus or in college?” They jot their responses down on post-it notes that they place on the wall for everyone to see. It might not surprise you to know that their biggest concerns are social: will their peers judge them for their opinions, for not knowing enough, for being too vocal? Will the discovery that they believe something different from their friends lead to ostracization from the group that they’ve only recently come to belong in? 

The conversations I’ve had with incoming students about their anxiety around political discussion has led me to think more broadly about how to incorporate political discussion into my classroom. Thus, when I had the opportunity to participate in the Associated Colleges of the South’s Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative (DeeP) and to collaborate with DCI, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to build a class in which discussion took a primary role. This spring, I taught a course on Political Psychology and we grounded our investigation of psychological concepts in deliberative political theory and its application in real-world political contexts. In short, the course asked “Can deliberation be an effective component of governance and citizen engagement, given what we know about human psychology?” 

In developing the course, I knew I wanted students to engage with deliberation both academically—through readings and in-class discussion—and experientially—through their own deliberation on an issue facing contemporary American politics. The biggest hurdle then became structuring the in-class deliberations. The course had 22 enrolled students, which made a full-class deliberation unwieldy, but simultaneous small group deliberations required students to moderate (something I’d have to train them to do) and made it difficult for me to grade through simple observation of the discussion. 

Ultimately, I decided that we’d hold two in-class deliberations throughout the semester and that students would take on one of two roles—participant or observer—in each. Participants were expected to read the deliberation materials in advance, write a brief (1-2 paragraph) statement of where they fall on the issue in advance, and engage in the conversation for the full 75-minute course, adhering to the guidelines for deliberation we’d developed from our readings and own class norms. Observers were expected to pose a research question related to deliberation and describe how they’d measure it, then attempt to execute that data collection strategy during the class time. We also recorded the discussion, in part so observers could go back and look things up they might have missed, and in part to make it possible for students who had to miss class for athletics or COVID-19 related reasons to make up the assignment. 

Overall, I found the deliberative discussions and affiliated assignments achieved my course goals and were interesting and engaging for both me and the students. In their reflections on deliberation, several participants commented that in spite of their initial anxiety about talking politics with their peers, they had found the discussions to be a positive experience. 

All of the students seemed to take their roles seriously and everyone made at least one comment during their assigned day to deliberate. It was clear from their reflective essays that students understood what the components of deliberation were, relative to a general discussion or conversation, and could apply the political psychology research we’d read about knowledge acquisition, information processing, partisan identity, and cognitive biases to their own experience either deliberating or observing their peers’ deliberation.

While many enjoyed the experience, they also emphasized the deliberations’ weaknesses, calling attention to the ways our practice failed to live up to normative ideals. Of particular interest was the expectation that all participants have equal opportunity to speak. Several observers counted how many times political science majors spoke relative to non-majors, finding the political science majors more engaged. Another argued for the importance of a more active moderator, drawing on observational data demonstrating that the three participants that spoke the most during one deliberative discussion were also responsible for interrupting or talking over those who spoke the least. 

Each of these findings, as well as the overall experience participating in the deliberations, became an opportunity for classroom discussion about deliberative theory, practice, and the psychological biases and limitations on information processing that widen the gap between the two. They also serve as an important set of takeaways for me as a teacher, leading me to reflect on how to bring different voices into the conversation and on the extent to which I should be a more active moderator. 

I look forward to incorporating more deliberative discussion into other classes I teach as part of my goal to reduce students’ anxiety around talking politics. Even if our classroom conversations fell short of the deliberative ideal, they succeeded by helping the students form and express their own political opinions in the face of social pressure—reducing their worries from their first days as freshmen.

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.

The first-year writing seminar that I have taught this Spring semester explores questions of democratic health and the possibilities for political reform in the United States. Course readings emphasize the role of democratic norms and traditions, the challenge of persistent inequalities in American life, the erosion of public trust and faith in institutions, and the prospects for multiracial democracy and civic renewal. Given this thematic focus, along with the advantages of a small class size, deliberation has been employed both as a pedagogical tool and as a democratic practice to be examined for its possible utility for what ails American democracy. 

When preparing this course, though, I was concerned about how incorporating deliberative exercises could support my primary learning outcome of improving student writing. This concern immediately proved to be unfounded. Dedicating significant class time to the study of deliberative ideals and the cultivation of deliberative skills did not compete with, nor distract from, the goal of writing development. Rather, an attention to deliberation substantially complemented and directly informed this central curricular objective. While there were clear benefits for students to write about deliberation, even more significant to their growth as writers were the opportunities to deliberate about writing. The commitments that a participant is expected to embody in a deliberative setting – for example, the ability to provide reasoned judgments for one’s position and an openness to consider (and reflect upon) opposing arguments – are clearly transferable to the written work students are asked to produce. By the conclusion of the collaborative peer review and revision processes, students had become, we could say, engaged in the act of writing deliberatively.

Illustrative of this trajectory were our conversations about John Gastil and Katherine Knobloch’s Hope for Democracy (2021), a compelling text about the history, theory, and practice of citizen initiative review (CIR) boards. Situated within the most recent scholarship on democratic deliberation, readers are presented with a structurally intriguing narrative that combines character-driven storytelling with rigorous social science methods, written in a manner accessible to an undergraduate audience. Class discussions focused on matters of form and content, the mechanics of a strong argument, the evidentiary support for posited assertions, the plausibility of advocated reforms, and the authorial choices that should be emulated (or avoided) as students prepared their own prose. 

Students especially appreciated the clear introduction to the CIR (and other deliberative approaches to deepening citizenship), the emphasis on individual political agency, the efforts at measuring the effects of the CIR on political knowledge, and the authors’ willingness to address counterarguments such as the possible “democratic illusions” of direct democracy. Class critiques of Hope for Democracy were both stylistic and substantive. Some students responded unfavorably to the novelistic vignettes which frame most of the chapters while many of us (including the professor) were perplexed by the book’s unorthodox citation practices. In terms of content, several students questioned the plausibility (Is this reform scalable?) and the desirability (Are certain issues not amenable to deliberation?) of the proposed reform.  

If the scope of the challenges that the nation faces cannot be ameliorated by deliberation, as many students concluded, are there specific political reforms that could significantly strengthen U.S. democracy? This was the organizing prompt of our final in-class deliberation. Utilizing Gastil and Knobloch’s book as our point of departure, we then proceeded to a consideration of each student’s own preferred reform, which they would then expound upon in their final essays. By design, these more formalized deliberations occur at the conclusion of each section of the course, when students are digesting the insights of the primary reading and are beginning to think about how to contribute to a scholarly conversation and, in so doing, further develop their own analytical voice. Encouraged to read passages from their drafts in progress, students were now poised to share their own writing decisions, describe the novelty of their ideas, and receive critical (yet collegial) comments from their colleagues. Having just interrogated the claims of Hope for Democracy, students were now prepared to accept a similar treatment of their own efforts.1 

Students recognized that speaking about their writing ultimately improved their writing. In their course evaluations, many students remarked about the positive impact of these deliberative experiences on their writing. Deliberations were generative, and for some students, unexpectedly enjoyable:

         “I like how we were able to collect our thoughts through deliberation before writing assignments. The deliberations allowed me to bounce my ideas off of my peers and my professor.”

         “I am a big fan of discussing my ideas before having the chance to write about them so I feel like my writing really benefited from all of the speaking we did in class.”

          “I was excited for [deliberation] days, when we each came in after forming our own takeaways from the content we were assigned…I always felt like I was getting detailed feedback. It was almost fun to edit afterwards.”

If instructors are inclined to experiment with deliberative pedagogy, it is helpful to schedule multiple deliberations throughout the semester as it takes time for students to become familiarized with the expectations of the format and to develop stronger relationships such that they are willing to be more open with (and receptive to) their peers. As one student observed,

         The [deliberations] got to a deep, interesting level that…helped everyone to contribute to conversations more throughout the semester; we all got comfortable around each other and the small class environment really aided in that, for me specifically.

Despite my initial reservations about how deliberative pedagogy might function in a writing intensive course, my experience has been particularly rewarding. The reasons for which I attribute this success, though, are important to reiterate as they may not be applicable to others considering incorporating this approach. With fewer than ten students in each of the two sections I taught, students quickly developed a group rapport that would have been less likely to occur in a larger (more impersonal) class environment. This small class size made it possible for the group to practice informal deliberative talk throughout the semester, and for those less inclined to vocally participate, class deliberations, as a student affirmed, “forced [me] out of my comfort zone in the best way.” 

Additionally, a deliberative approach was especially well suited to the thematic focus of the seminar. We were never sacrificing attention to substantive material when our focus turned to deliberation. Indeed, as a proposed remedy to strengthen democratic health, democratic deliberation was certainly relevant to course content.2 These distinctive circumstances notwithstanding, deliberative pedagogy can play a productive role in many different types of classroom settings if the instructor has thought through its potential applications in a purposeful and deliberative manner.

1. An important final step of the assignment is the requirement that students include written reflections to the peer reviews as part of their revised essay submissions.

2. While this post has discussed Gastil and Knobloch’s Hope for Democracy, each of the four assigned books for this course address material which connects to democratic deliberation.