The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of faculty from Davidson College and other higher education 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 to study and discuss 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 Kelly Whitmer (2024-25 Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative Faculty Fellow)
One of the things I am most interested in as a scholar-teacher is how we come to know what we know and to believe what we do. For me, the study of history creates a powerful foundation for better understanding the sources of our knowledge and beliefs. It creates countless opportunities for critically examining change over time by taking into consideration the worldviews of various historical actors, who (like all of us) often found themselves in difficult situations, had to make quick decisions and even respond to ethical dilemmas while also simply trying to go about their daily lives. I was drawn to participating in the DCI Collaborative because the initiative seemed to me – and my experience as a DeeP Collaborative Faculty Fellow has confirmed this – to be creating new opportunities for students and faculty to explore questions about knowledge, certainty and “tricky problems” in highly reflective and nuanced ways.
In one of the last readings we did for one of our virtual small group discussions, a chapter focused on ‘bounded autonomy’ in the book The Political Classroom (by Diana E. Hess and Paula McAvoy), I was struck by the authors’ discussion of “what students learned” in the classroom of a particular teacher. The authors noted that a marker of this teacher’s success, particularly when it came to discussing a difficult or divisive topic, was his ability to turn his classroom into a space where students really had time – and also had the tools – to reflect on that topic’s complexity.
Students reported coming away from class discussions feeling less certain about their views than they did beforehand (p. 145). They also left the class more willing to accept the possibility that they might be wrong, or that they had more to learn about other perspectives. I realized that a similar kind of aspiration had been operating for me at a kind of intuitive level throughout the entire semester. I see now too that many of my students had been telling me in various ways that our deliberations had, in fact, helped them to realize how much they did not know, and still wanted to learn, about the topics we had explored.
I embedded a “deliberative pedagogy” approach in a 100 level History course I teach (primarily for first- and second-year students) called “Science, Society and the Archives.” The course is already associated with a “perspective-taking” General Education requirement in my college, which means that I have arranged it in such a way that students have opportunities to encounter the experiences and perspectives of marginalized historical actors in the history of the sciences and to consider these alongside related histories of socioeconomic and political struggle. But there is a difference between simply considering these experiences and perspectives and actually giving voice to them in the context of a deliberation.
Informed and inspired by our readings and discussions, I decided to create opportunities for students to do role playing as part of my deliberation strategy. I organized the class around four deliberation topics: (a.) animal/human experimentation in the history of the sciences; (b.) natural history and empire; (c.) science and religion (we focused on the Scopes Trial); and (d.) science denial and disinformation. I created a deep framework for students to approach each topic through lectures and engagement with primary sources, after which I assigned them a social identity and then asked them to respond to a deliberation question in the voice/persona of a specific historical actor.
Students wrote “position papers” in the voice of these actors, which were due before our designated “deliberation day.” I found that this step helped students feel more confident in their ability to participate in our deliberation day discussions. I also asked students to write and post short “debrief” responses on Brightspace, where they could talk about what it had felt like to give voice to a perspective they may or may not have entirely agreed with. Some talked about how the experience had helped them gain a new appreciation for the challenges that particular historical actors faced, challenges or struggles they had never really considered before.
I really learned a lot from this experience on the whole and am still processing it! I realized, for example, that the success of the deliberation units I created hinged on how well I had managed to curate the related readings and historical roles. I underestimated how much time and energy it would take me to create a deliberative framework where the issues could be effectively historicized and primed for student engagement, deep reflection. I also struggled a bit with mixed levels of student participation in the actual deliberations. When I teach the course again, I plan to experiment with a “fishbowl” model for the deliberations themselves. I may also create more opportunities for students to assess their own participation and the relative “success” of the deliberation as part of the debrief process, which I left relatively unstructured in this first go around.
