Faculty Posts

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.

By Camille K. Lewis (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.

Isocrates, the first settled teacher of rhetoric, found the dead-end of eristic speech (or argument-for-argument’s sake) to be unethical. For him, phronêsis or “practical wisdom” was the goal of a rhetorical education. As my professor used to say, “We need to get out of the ivory tower. We need to take it to the streets!”

Toward that end for the Spring 2023 semester, I revamped Furman University’s Communication Studies capstone course COM 460 Communication Ethics to give our students that kind of high impact experience in phronêsis. Over the semester, the students heard subject-matter experts present the problems of prison reform, anti-Critical-Race-Theory legislation, decolonizing the archive, medical care for BIPOC women, the societal barriers limiting public art, and refugee resettlement legislation. This is a broad variety of problems from across the university—public health, libraries, education, politics, and art.

Students were required to listen, research, assess, create a solution, and then present their solution a week later. The curriculum design compels them to engage across disciplinary and interpersonal differences so that they can find new ways of thinking and responding to these real-world problems. At the end of this course, students should be able to:

• Define the boundaries of real-world problems with empathy and through active listening.
• Analyze those problems by conducting research in order to document its causes and effects.
• Establish criteria integrating trade-offs and tensions.
• Synthesize and reflect on the causes, effects, and criteria by imagining and choosing solutions which are ethical, workable, and creative.
• Collaborate productively with peers in order to come to shared decisions for the sake of the common good.
• Build substantive relationships with peers, experts and the community.
• Present eloquent and effective public messages that address the problems and its solutions using complex reasoning.
• Integrate and reflect on frequent feedback (both formal and informal) into future performance.

But this kind of interdisciplinary conversation can get unwieldly. To foreground good deliberative practice, I have adapted the Deliberative Pedagogy Learning Outcomes rubric created by Sara A. Mehltretter Drury, Leila R. Brammer, and Joni Doherty to the outcomes of COM 460.[1] Their rubric was more generic, and I needed the assessment to feature my class’s specific outcomes taken from the steps in John Dewey’s Reflective-Thinking Sequence. I used this adapted rubric for every class discussion group—with at least one student consistently assessing the group dynamic along with me.

To familiarize the students with the rubric, I had the students arrive on the first day having read Drury’s chapter, “Cultivating Dialogue and Deliberation through Speech, Silence, and Synthesis.” After discussion, I wanted them to test their active listening by playing a RadioLab podcast, “Dixie Disappearance,” from Dolly Parton’s America. I brought quiet puzzles, coloring books, and other stim toys to occupy their fingers while they listen. After we discussed that active listening strategy, I divided them up randomly into three groups for them to follow the reflective-thinking process. During their discussion, I assessed their discussion practices using the deliberative rubric. This rubric became, as Drury et al state, a “robust tool for instruction, learning, and assessment” in order to prepare my students to resist siloing their education in the ivory tower and “take it to the streets.”

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Notes

[1] Sara A. Mehltretter Drury, Leila R. Brammer, and Joni Doherty, “Assessment through a Deliberative Pedagogy: Learning Outcomes Rubric,” in Maxine S. Thomas, Idit Manosevitch, Nicholas V. Longo, and Timothy J. Shaffer, Deliberative Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning for Democratic Engagement, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017), muse.jhu.edu/book/52064.

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.

Posted below is Dr. Nobis’s video blog post below about his plans to incorporate elements of deliberative pedagogy into a metaphysics course at Morehouse College (his second deliberation-involved course he has developed through the DeeP Collaborative). Dr. Nobis discusses how, through the processes of deliberation, he will connect the abstract issues of metaphysics — e.g., who we are, what we are, etc. — to practical issues, such as abortion, euthanasia, transgender issues, etc. He does so by having the students prepare for a series of debates by small groups that have to prepare to present on multiple sides of the issue at hand. Check out the video below to learn more about the course.

The 2021-22 cohort of 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.

I warned students in my PHL 310 class at Furman University this spring that we were going to be covering some dark material. We began with an overview of liberalism. I used Michael Freeden’s Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction along with primary texts from Locke, Kant, Mill, and Rawls to define the liberal tradition—with all of its internal differences and complexities—as a philosophical paradigm that puts the dignity of the human person at its center.

We then examined a series of challenges to liberalism. We looked at Jonathan Livingstone Smith’s On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, which questions whether there is a philosophical justification for human dignity and implicitly challenges liberalism as being overly optimistic about human evil. We read Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, which defends a pessimistic account of the prevalence of misogyny and liberalism’s failure to address it. We explored Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, which criticizes the “color blind” approaches to racial equality typical of some forms of liberalism. We read Jennifer M. Silva’s We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America, a sociological account that depicts the rage, despair, and hopelessness of many working-class Americans, who seem to be disempowered by liberal individualism.

I intentionally planned the course to raise a number of “hot button” issues. Philosophers are lucky in that their standard approach to teaching – raising provocative questions and having students debate answers to them – already approximates democratic deliberation to some degree. But participating in the Deliberative Pedagogy Seminar encouraged me to add formal activities aimed at promoting deliberation. I devoted three 75-minute class sessions to deliberation exercises.

The first was a “fishbowl” activity. This activity involved dividing the class into two groups. The first group sat in a circle on the floor, while the second group sat at their desks in circle around them. I had the group in the inner circle deliberate about a particular issue. (The issue had to do with whether the idea of “natural human rights” was still tenable and what we ought to do to prevent horrors like genocide.) Once the first group had deliberated for a while, the students in the second group were allowed to ask clarifying questions and offer observations about the inner group’s deliberation. I then had the groups switch places and repeat the activity. Afterward, students reported that sitting close together on the floor in a “fishbowl” created a sense of intimacy and trust that made it easier for them to share their thoughts with others.

The second deliberation activity I did is called “take a position.” Using masking tape, I placed a line down the middle of the classroom. If students stood on one side of the line, that indicated that they agreed with a statement. If they stood on the other side, that indicated that they disagreed. I then read a series of controversial statements such as: “A big factor keeping poor people down in the U.S. is their over-reliance on government assistance,” “We have an obligation to help the oppressed—as long as they are not racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or xenophobic,” and “The political system in the U.S. is largely deaf to the concerns of working-class Americans.” After each statement, I asked a selection of students why they ended up on the side of the line they did and why they disagreed with some of their fellow students. Students sometimes managed to persuade each other to switch sides!

The last deliberation activity I did is called “four corners.” I divided the class into four groups. In each of the four corners of the room, I taped a question to the wall addressed to the book we were reading (Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny). Questions included whether Manne was too pessimistic about the pervasiveness and intractability of misogyny, whether she inadvertently slighted the value of caring work, whether she was correct in her claim that misogyny was to blame for the election of Donald Trump, and whether she was right to claim that young Americans were more prone to misogyny than they might care to admit. The student groups rotated from corner to corner, spending about ten minutes discussing the question at each one. Before asking the groups to move to the next corner, I would go around the room and have each group summarize their discussion – including any disagreements that arose. After each group had visited each corner, we discussed the issues raised by each question as an entire class.

Each of these three activities was useful at promoting deliberation among the students. I cannot say that I fully incorporated deliberation into the class this semester, at least not in the way I envision in my course plan. This was primarily because the material for the course was entirely new to me, and it would have been too time-consuming to completely revamp my teaching methodology. But the baby steps I took did encourage students to deliberate in a more focused way than the more “freewheeling” approach I have taken in the past. I also noticed that these more structured activities enabled some of the quieter students to feel comfortable participating. I look forward to increasing the amount of deliberative theory, pedagogy, and activities in future versions of PHL 310.

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.