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 Nicholas Triplett (2023-24 Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative Faculty Fellow)
In my regular teaching duties, I prepare prospective history teachers to help young people make meaning of the past. I also help current teachers (re)conceptualize how identity, culture, and belief influence the decisions they make in the classroom. In the process of doing those things, it is often necessary to elicit, evaluate, and interact with my students’ ideas about complex conceptions like teaching, learning, history, identity, justice, fairness, and so forth. From a pedagogical perspective, my hope was that deliberative practices might be an effective, constructive way to draw out and examine my students’ understandings of these course concepts.
To accomplish this goal, I integrated deliberation into a graduate-level, 100% online course titled: Equity and Education. I had roughly 20 students in the course. Most were experienced, full-time teachers earning a master’s degree, but I also had some early career teachers and several people entering teaching as a second career after leaving the world of business and/or finance.
The course began with three weeks of introductory material on conceptions of equity and the basics of deliberation. This part of the course concluded with an initial micro-deliberation. We spent the next 12 weeks learning about, preparing for, and deliberating on various equity discourses (race, gender, language/nativity, class, dis/ability, etc.) with approximately two weeks dedicated to each topic/discourse and each culminating in a formal deliberation conducted live in Zoom.
The logistics of deliberating online required us to hold “self-facilitated” deliberations. Groups of 4-5 students deliberated without a formal facilitator, and they were collectively responsible for enacting and enforcing the norms and dispositions of deliberation. I was able to formally facilitate one of the groups in a given session, but soon it became clear that students preferred self-facilitation.
Self-facilitation was a surprising success in the course. I believe this was because 1) we spent several weeks learning about and justifying the need for proper deliberative dispositions, and 2) because this was a graduate level course where students were compelled (by grades) to come into the deliberation conversant in the various perspectives on a topic.
So, even though we addressed tough questions about highly controversial topics, and although deliberations were not facilitated in a traditional manner, they were more like collegial but spirited discussion than the kind of bitter partisan debates we often see in the media. Deliberating in Zoom also made it convenient to record, post, and review the deliberations afterward. I could ask students to re-watch the deliberations and provide detailed evaluations of their individual and/or group performances replete with examples, video time-stamps, and analysis.
Deliberation was transformative in terms of my hope that deliberative practices might help me draw out and examine my students’ understandings of course material. The depth of analysis I observed from students and their willingness to speak and listen to others were unprecedented for me as an instructor. Furthermore, I was also able to hear students talk about themselves, their lives and experiences in ways that gave me a much deeper appreciation of each of them as people. Pedagogically, deliberation was a resounding success.
