One of the big challenges — and opportunities — for encouraging more robust deliberation on college campuses is providing faculty members with the tools and frameworks that can help them create more deliberation-based courses. The DCI has contributed to this work through its Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Collaborative, which has included over 60 faculty members from 28 institutions who have integrated deliberation about contentious topics into their syllabi. But how do we scale that work to include more faculty at more institutions, both across the country and around the world?
With support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) recently launched a five-part online series about deliberative dialogue that can help many more faculty members incorporate these strategies into their teaching. The series will be available to the more than 60,000 faculty at over 600 higher education institutions that partner with ACUE to help them improve the quality of their teaching. As a series of short Quick Studies, the series includes expert videos, student voices, real classroom examples, and an accessible “Engage, Envision, Experience, Explore” framework that makes deliberation both compelling and feasible for faculty members to adapt to their classrooms. An introduction to the series is available below.
DCI Faculty Director Graham Bullock served as the featured expert for the first two Quick Studies in the series, “What is Deliberative Dialogue?” and “Integrating Deliberative Dialogue into Your Course.” In his first short video, he explains how deliberative dialogue differs from other forms of discourse (conversation, discussion, dialogue, and debate), and why it is a useful framework for the college classroom. You can view the full video below.
“What is Deliberative Dialogue?”
In his second video, Dr. Bullock discusses why and how faculty might integrate deliberative dialogue into their courses. He explores how to introduce the principles and practices of deliberation to students, how to select topics for deliberation, how to design deliberative classroom activities, and how to assess student engagement. The short video is available below.
“Integrating Deliberative Dialogue into Your Course“
The other Quick Studies focus on “Preparing for Deliberative Dialogue Through Practice,” “Launching a Deliberative Dialogue,” and “Facilitating a Deliberative Dialogue,” and they feature insights from other experts on deliberation in higher education, including Nick Longo and Quincy Bevely from Providence College, John Rose from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Sandy Marshall and Jennifer Uno from Elon College, and Sarah Donovan from Wagner College.
If you are interested in viewing all of these Quick Studies and completing ACUE’s full series on deliberative dialogue, inquire with your institution to see if it is a member of ACUE. If so, you can access the series via the ACUE Commons.
