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 Brandon Inabinet (2024-25 Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative Faculty Fellow)
My starting point was easy enough, with a Rhetoric and Strategy class in a liberal arts college in a program about advocacy and civic argumentation. If not deliberation, we would have already had students studying the ancient and modern ideas about stasis and topoi, argument fields and spheres, prima facie case construction, burden of proof, and fallacies.
But my institution has an initiative On Discourse that attempts to create more lively exchange and representation of different viewpoints on campus. The class nor the major were part of the initiative. The President had invited colleagues principally from the various DEI offices and sociology to serve with law and politics faculty. What they had landed on was bolstering the intergroup dialogue program (pleasing “the left”) and sponsoring more campus events with opponents on panels or in debate (pleasing “the right”).
In the broadly uninteresting and unnoticed middle was my curriculum. I realized how centering the preparation for and practice of deliberation, with the help of Graham Bullock and Davidson’s DCI, might elevate academic and critical interests in argumentation into a lively and transformative practice. Although I have taught the debate team and held debates in class, the emerging generation’s concerns about over-competitiveness has me embracing deliberation as a set of more transferable skills and values.
So, supplementing my normal instruction that feeds the debaters in the class, I motivated students with days in the curriculum “cleared out” for the practice of dialogue and deliberation, and a midterm project of creating deliberation guides.
Fitting in another learning objective, the students used AI technology (of their choice, mostly ChatGPT) to create the guides and visual rhetoric skills (of their choice, mostly Canva and Adobe) to meet audience needs. The latter part of this needed more instruction, as the use of researched charts and graphs alongside non-copyrighted images was surprisingly tougher for the students than the ability to detect and correct AI hallucination in research.
Another goal was dialogue before deliberation, to be able to compare these practices. In the fall semester this went well, but some calendar issues in the spring complicated this dynamic. I will go back to what I did in the fall to ensure dialogic listening is the foundation, and the motivation to diverge and converge and potentially act that comes with deliberation as the supplement.
One additional small issue I had was using deliberation guide writers as facilitators on those topics. I needed more time to prepare the students, reminding them that their new “expertise” on their assigned topics meant that they know how to navigate and question, not to weigh in themselves and bulldoze the conversation into what they had found as (recent) researchers. This was compounded because I chose to use local rather than national issues, and the deliberation guide research created newly passionate students who didn’t even realize the issue existed before it was assigned. So anytime student deliberators became quiet or confessed they weren’t fully informed became an opportunity for these researcher-facilitators to take center stage. As their professor, I had to be the “not fun” person who would intervene and disrupt this, even as the other students really wanted to hear the student facilitator’s newly found opinions.
Still, students were ambassadors for this approach and now other courses in the department and administrators in the university are interested in what we did (such as including texts Try To Love the Question and Why We Argue, and the online tool of UnifyAmerica’s College Challenge). I look forward to the expanded scope and reach of deliberative practice being a part of the broader On Discourse initiative at my institution.
