Faculty Posts

By Erik A. Anderson (Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy, Furman University, DeeP Collaborative Member)

The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 20+ 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. These faculty come from a wide array of disciplines and backgrounds. They come together to study and discuss different 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.

This semester at Furman University, I incorporated deliberative pedagogy into my ethics course. We hear much about how polarized Americans are about moral issues, and there is a widespread impression that Gen Z students are too busy “cancelling” each other to discuss controversial questions. I wanted to investigate to what extent these assumptions were true of my students. I also wanted to do what I could to open them up to having difficult conversations and to help them develop the skills they need to do so effectively.

My course was organized around contemporary moral issues. We covered five broad topics: freedom of speech, animal rights, racism and sexism, environmental ethics, and abortion. My plan was to hold “deliberation days” on each of these topics in which students would reason together about competing policies. The students were told that on these days, we would pretend the class was a legislature and that our job was to debate and then vote on which policies to adopt. I described deliberative pedagogy on the syllabus as aiming “to improve our abilities as citizens to engage in democratic deliberation about pressing moral and political issues. […] The specific aim of the course in relation to deliberation is that you develop the ability to engage in respectful discussion with others who disagree with you about moral questions that matter deeply to you.” In order to introduce deliberation to the students, I assigned readings by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy, and Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse. However, students primarily learned about deliberation by doing it.

Before the first deliberation day, I created “ten commandments,” in consultation with the class, that would govern our deliberations:

    (i) Judge ideas, not people.

    (ii) Be honest and respectful.

    (iii) Vegas rules: don’t post criticisms of your fellow students on social media.

    (iv) Commit to empathetic listening. Don’t listen just to find weaknesses in opposing views.

    (v) Try to understand competing perspectives and be fair to them.

    (vi) Disagree with curiosity, not hostility.

    (vii) Give other students the benefit of the doubt.

    (viii) Be brief so that everyone has the chance to participate.

    (ix) Monitor your body language: avoid eye rolls and other expressions of disdain.

    (x) Seek consensus, not victory.

In commenting on and explaining these rules, I connected them with some of the “deliberative virtues” developed in the literature as well as with the “deliberative dispositions” promoted by the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative. While it was largely up to the students to enforce the rules, there were, to my knowledge, no incidents in which students violated them.

I faced some practical challenges in organizing the deliberation days. Foremost among them was the lack of time (the class was only 50 minutes long) and the large size of the group (25 students). To make sure each student got to participate, I divided the class into groups of three and four students. I assigned students to the groups randomly and varied their membership each time in order to prevent students from only deliberating with friends or people they were likely to agree with. I also had the deliberation proceed through distinct stages. For each topic, I focused our attention on two competing policy proposals. In the first stage, students were instructed to present to their small group what they took to be the strongest arguments and the most serious objections to each of the competing proposals. The point was for students to articulate arguments for and against different policies without yet defending a position of their own. I hoped this would encourage them to be even-handed. Only after they laid out considerations for and against each proposal did I ask them, in the second stage, to state what position they supported and why. At this stage, they engaged in deliberation proper. They sought to persuade the members of their small group that their favored proposal was the better one. I circulated around the room so I could get a sense of how things were going, but I remained hands-off because I didn’t want to inhibit or influence their conversations.

After about 25 minutes in their small groups, we moved to a third stage in which each small group reported to the whole class about how their deliberations had gone. Was there any consensus about the best proposal? Was one of the proposals more widely accepted than the other? What were the reasons for and against each proposal articulated in the deliberation? Then, in a fourth stage, I posed the question again for the whole class to consider: which of the two proposals should we, as a class, adopt? My thinking was that individuals who offered arguments addressed to the whole class would have had their understanding of the issue and their arguments refined through their small group deliberations. In the whole group deliberation, students explained why they found the arguments favoring one of the proposals to be more compelling than those supporting the alternative. When one person defended a particular view, I would ask for rebuttals from the other side. While it was very tempting for me give my own input, I tried to stay in a facilitative role and to leave the deliberation up to the students themselves.

In a final stage, after about 15 minutes of whole-group deliberation, we took a vote. Students voted anonymously on Zoom, which instantly tallied the results. As the vote happened right at the end of our 50-minute class, I had to wait for the following class to debrief the exercise. Students had to write a “deliberation report” in which they summarized the arguments for and against the two proposals, defended their own view, reflected on the process of deliberation (for example, I asked them whether at any point they had changed their minds), and had the opportunity to devise their own alternative proposals.

One thing I didn’t anticipate was how difficult it was to come up with proposals for the students to discuss that were clearly distinct and yet both had initial plausibility. On free speech, for example, I decided to focus on the limits on what kinds of controversial materials professors could teach in class. There was consensus that professors and students shouldn’t use hate speech (e.g. slurs, verbal attacks) and that it was permissible for professors to assign materials that contained examples of hate speech as long as there were legitimate academic reasons for doing so. But students disagreed about material containing academic arguments in support of (what they took to be) racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic conclusions. I wanted the class to deliberate about a proposal that was relatively permissive — giving professors more leeway to assign controversial materials — and one that was more restrictive. But the more plausible I tried to make the two proposals, the more qualified and nuanced they became, the more they started to blur into one another. On the other hand, the more distinct I tried to make them, the more “extreme” they became, which threatened to make them nonstarters for the students. The proposals I ended up with were somewhat vague and ambiguous, saying things like “professors may assign materials that present sexist, racist, or other objectionable ideas as long as doing so serves a legitimate academic purpose” and “professors should not assign materials that marginalize, exclude, or denigrate students on the basis of their race, sex, gender identity, etc.” Students interpreted a number of the key phrases in these proposals differently, which meant that they weren’t always assigning the same meanings to the competing alternatives.

Despite this (unresolved) problem, students reported that they enjoyed the activity of deliberation and found it useful. There were no heated conflicts and it didn’t seem to me that students felt the need to censor themselves (though it’s hard to know for sure — in hindsight, I should have asked them about self-censorship on their deliberation reports). I do have to mention one caveat, however. The whole semester we were building toward a deliberation day on the most controversial issue by far, abortion. Unfortunately, I came down with COVID after spring break and had to cancel a number of classes. As a result, we were not able to have a final deliberation on abortion. That issue would have been an important test case for how proficient the students had become at deliberation. I can say, though, that the discussions we had on the readings about abortion were civil and productive even when we discussed pro-life views, which conflicted with the views held by most students. One student who said early in the semester that “men are not entitled to have an opinion about abortion” had by the end of the term come around to seeing the importance of listening to diverse perspectives on the issue.

As a first-time experiment, my attempt to teach ethics deliberatively wasn’t entirely successful, but it was successful enough to be worth working on and improving in the future. I was especially impressed by how seriously the students took our deliberation days — as if the members of Gen Z were hungry for the kinds of respectful moral and political conversations that are so lacking in America today.

By Dan Aldridge (Chair & Professor of Africana Studies, Professor of History, DeeP Collaborative Member)

The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 20+ 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. These faculty come from a wide array of disciplines and backgrounds. They come together to study and discuss different 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.

I agreed to participate in the Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Collaborative because I wanted to improve the quality of student engagement with major issues in American history without fear of facing and expressing a wide range of points of view and to encourage their development as citizens who will be engaged in public issues in the decades to come.  I teach a course that is an introduction to 20^th century US History aimed primarily and 1^st and 2^nd year students.  I focused the course on four broad “issues”: The United States’ emergence as an imperial power and future world power at the beginning of the 20th century; the life and career of Margaret Sanger as a way of exploring issues involving feminism, birth control, eugenics and related issues; varying interpretations of the meanings of the civil rights movement of the 1960s; and the different views of liberals and conservatives about the direction of American life since the 1960s.

After we finished readings, lectures, and discussions about each issue I would assign groups of students to hold a debate about the issues raised.  For example, I asked one group of four students to support the United States’ becoming an imperial and global power in the early 20^th century while another group of four argued the anti-imperialist position.  After each side made its presentation the remaining students in the course would ask questions of the two debate teams.  Finally, the class as a whole would discuss the issues raised.  I have found from in-class observation, student comments, and student evaluations that they greatly enjoyed the debates and found them to be pedagogically valuable.  The debate/discussion format seems to enable students to take historical issues that seemingly belong in the “past” come alive and become more relevant to them and their contemporary lives.

Students also reacted well to reading a wide variety of points of view about historical issues including perspectives from the Right, Left, and Center.  Students read strongly pro-imperialist and somewhat racialist arguments for imperialism by authors such as Theodore Roosevelt; they read scathing critiques for US foreign policy from the Left by Noam Chomsky; they watched African American conservative intellectual Thomas Sowell critique much of the conventional wisdom about race and rights held by liberals and progressives; and they read Jeanne Theoharis argue that our understanding of civil right activism of the 1960s understates its radicalism.  They also read Catholic writers who strongly critiqued birth control, abortion and feminism as well as feminist authors who strongly supported those things.

I found that students were not angered or intimidated by being exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints, including many that would not be currently deemed to be “correct” or “polite.”  Indeed, a number commented on how they liked that the course was open to a wide variety of opinions and not committed to promoting a particular ideology or point of view.  I plan to incorporate more elements in deliberative discussion in other courses I teach where needed and appropriate.

The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 20+ 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. These faculty come from a wide array of disciplines and backgrounds. They come together to study and discuss different 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.

By Bassil El-Zaatari (Assistant Professor of Chemistry, DeeP Collaborative Member)

Plastic pollution remains one of the largest challenges facing us in today’s world. Met with an ever-growing population, the use of plastic materials continues to flourish with limited ability to recycle and reprocess these materials. In fact, projections now show that by the year 2050, there may be more plastic in the ocean than fish. As I embarked on teaching polymer chemistry for the first time this semester at Davidson College, I knew I had to balance what I was teaching from a scientific perspective with thoughtful understandings of the socioeconomic, political, and historical implications of the synthesized materials discussed in class. Through the Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Collaborative, I set up a framework of discussions and readings throughout the semester that culminated in a final “debate” activity during the last week of class.

On the first day of class, I explained to my students that it is critical for us, as current and future scientists, to address STEM-related controversial modern issues including stem cell research, climate change, energy policy, and pollution levels. I made sure they understood that while the ubiquity of polymers and plastics in everyday life has been critical to human advancement, the waste generated from plastic waste has been detrimental to ecosystems, especially aquatic life, and its landfill and incineration has been linked to worsening climate change.

Throughout the semester, I tried to link topics that we were learning about to broader issues and local events. One example that comes to mind was after the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio that was carrying vinyl chloride, a precursor to synthesize polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a widely utilized plastic material. We chatted about the environmental implications of this polymer precursor from the spillage as well as methods that could have prevented it. We discussed what type of socioeconomic impacts that this derailment will have on the area for years to come and whether the need to synthesize PVC outweighed its potential hazards during manufacturing and post synthesis.

As the semester was coming to an end, the final debate tasked the students to come up with the best approach to the following prompt:

“You and your team have been appointed to solve the plastic pollution problem by world leaders from all over the world. You will have to come up with a plan of action using your polymer chemistry knowledge. You will have to decide where to start from in tackling this problem and present your findings to the class.”

This prompt was supplemented by several articles, both from scientific journals and periodicals, that the students had to read prior to the start of the activity, as well as a special topic lecture that discussed current methods of plastic recycling and reprocessing. While debating this topic, the students were prompted to keep the following questions in mind:

(1) How can we balance the importance of polymers and plastics with the waste generated from not being able to recycle, reprocess and reuse most of them?
(2) Can we reach a world in which plastic waste is a thing of the past?
(3) Does plastic free actually mean pollution free?

The activity was split into two 75-minute class periods. During the first session of the debate, the students were separated into four small groups (consisting of three or four students each) and were prompted to arrive at an evidence-supported position on this topic while weighing pertinent scientific, socioeconomic, and political implications. I walked around the different groups, listened to their conversations, and helped facilitate discussions. The students felt passionate about their positions and worked hard to convince their groupmates of the best approach to this problem, while keeping an open mind and listening to others.

Towards the end of the class period most groups had agreed on a plan of action to present during the next session. In the second session, the groups presented their findings to their classmates. Each presentation was up to ten minutes long and was followed by 5 to 10 minutes of questions from the rest of the class. I was impressed by the elegance in the solutions the classmates produced and the intensity of the Q&A session that followed.

Overall, I would say that the activity was a success and the students left the semester with a sense of scientific intersectionality that they may have not encountered in previous STEM classes. The students seemed to enjoy the activity and were passionate about their positions and defending them to others. The use of deliberation in future chemistry classes is something I intend to implement and improve on.

By Emily Sydnor (DeeP Collaborative Member)

The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 20+ 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. These faculty come from a wide array of disciplines and backgrounds. They come together to study and discuss different 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.

Every other spring, the political science department at Southwestern University offers a Texas Legislative Internships course that pairs classroom education on state policy and politics with real-world experience in a state legislative office. While it’s one of the oldest legislative internship programs in Texas, this spring was my first year teaching the class. As I started to think about how to approach a class with such a large integrative learning component, the deliberative pedagogy toolkit that I’ve developed as part of the Associated Colleges of the South’s Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative (DeeP) and collaboration with DCI stood out as a potentially effective strategy.

I wrote the first version of this post at what always feels like the most hopeful part of course-building to me—the ideas are integrated into the syllabus and I can imagine how they will translate into class discussions, course projects, and lasting takeaways for students. In the case of this class, we started with an overview of the Texas legislature, theories of political representation and fundamentals of institutional design before moving into our exploration of deliberation. My last course that integrated deliberative pedagogy, which you can read more about here, emphasized the importance of deliberation for citizen engagement with and knowledge of the political world.

In this case, we are more interested in how deliberation can work for legislatures and other supposedly-deliberative bodies. How do elected officials deliberate on major policy questions? How do they encourage and respond to deliberation by their constituencies? Where do the students, as they are working in their respective legislative offices, encounter deliberation? My hope was that we would engage with each of these questions, paying particular attention to the institutional structures and design choices that facilitate deliberation. For the second half of the class, my plan was for us to engage in deliberation as a class about the same issues that, ideally, the Texas legislature would be discussing as part of their session.

The class was expected to be small—about 9 people—and so for each of our three deliberative discussions, I set the class up so that three of them served as facilitators. They would decide what material the rest of the class would engage with to learn more about the issue being deliberated, constructing an “issue guide” similar to those created by the DCI and the National Issues Forum. They would also direct the discussion itself, posing questions, prompting quiet students to engage, and reminding everyone of the norms of civility and mutual respect that undergird deliberative dialogue.

As with any class, the vision I had during the planning of the course and drafting of this blog post morphed during the semester. The deliberative component of the class was still present throughout, but became watered down for several reasons. First, the class ended up only enrolling four students, about half the number I had initially expected, who were placed in three different legislative offices. We found a wide range of differences in how each office assigned interns work and structured their responsibilities. And unique features of the Texas legislative calendar meant that exposure to certain deliberative elements of policymaking did not occur until very late in the semester.

With only four students, the original approach to deliberation facilitation put a lot of onus on a single student each week, more than I expected given the amount of out-of-class work they were already completing. Instead of making each student develop a thorough issue guide and lead class, we collectively selected a topic for the next class—everything from cybersecurity to immigration and school choice–and each student was required to find resources to help us learn more about that issue and form opinions. I then acted as the facilitator for each deliberation, sometimes asking students to arrive at a position on specific legislative and sometimes simply allowing them to explore the different dimensions of the issues. Even if the students did not have quite as much responsibility in developing the deliberative discussions, we nonetheless had robust and engaging discussions about each issue and I learned a great deal from them.

Our discussion of the extent to which the legislature itself works as a deliberative body was stymied by the organization of the state’s legislative calendar. For the first 60 days, legislators are really only writing and filing bills; committees are not constituted until mid-February and do not start holding hearings until after the filing deadline. I had our discussion of deliberation in legislative bodies scheduled for right before spring break, which coincided with the filing deadline. Thus, the students did not yet have much “real world” experience with deliberation, either through their representative’s committee or overall House or Senate debate. While I liked having this discussion before our own deliberations on issues, it may be worth moving it so that we can better evaluate the extent to which the legislature is deliberative.

My goal was to have us reflect as a group on what we thought went well or didn’t go well and how our discussion might translate into the kinds of conversation being had at the capitol. Are our legislators able to have the same sorts of conversations on the state House or Senate floor? Why or why not? How have the students’ experiences within the legislature shaped their opinions on the issues that we discuss?

Ultimately, the goal of the in-class deliberation was three-fold. First, I wanted students to practice sharing their political opinions and doing so in an evidence-based and civil way. They should have gained exposure to disagreement and reflected on how and why their own in-class conversations might not go the same way as the legislative deliberations they hopefully witnessed through their internships. I feel like I succeeded in this endeavor. Second, it let us do a deep dive into some of the controversial policy proposals that came up during this legislative session. Again, I think this component was successful, although I hope to provide even more depth to our topical case studies in the future. In a typical American Politics course, I spend little time on policy, but I think it is particularly relevant and valuable in the context of this course.

Finally, deliberation, and especially facilitation of deliberation, should help students develop listening skills, empathy, and civil ways to diffuse conflict and confrontation when it arises. When I talk to students about what makes them nervous when talking about politics, the sense that they don’t have a good way to handle disagreement is frequently raised. By getting practice talking about politics in a deliberative fashion and moderating that conversation among other people, they may be able to reduce their anxiety about talking politics. This piece was the hardest to assess, as the four students who chose to take the class were already pretty comfortable articulating their positions. However, we did manage to navigate difficult political discussions with empathy and listening—in direct contrast to some of the same debates within the legislature!

The reality of a course is never quite as perfect as my visions during the planning stage, but I nonetheless believe incorporating deliberation into this Texas Legislative Internships class turned out really well. It gave the students a chance to talk about and reflect on important policy decisions being made in our state as they worked in the very offices making those decisions.