2026-2027

By Savannah Downtin ‘ 28 (DCI Fellow)

While the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative encourages and fosters deliberative discussion on polarizing issues, my experience as a fellow has made me not only a better facilitator but also a better conversationalist. Conversation is a key building block to connection, creating bridges that bond people across personal and geographical gaps.

If conversation were a recipe, the first ingredient would be curiosity. Serving as one of our DCI deliberative dispositions, curiosity can make or break a conversation. Having a curious outlook naturally opens doors to new topics and encourages intellectual humility; it helps counter instinctive judgment that might arise during a conversation when someone expresses different viewpoints. Instead of writing these off, curiosity empowers us to look deeper and investigate the root cause of the opinion. 

Although many conversations don’t start with a concrete end goal like a deliberation or debate might, there is almost always the underlying motive to try to get to know the other person better. Every time someone offers new information about themselves in a conversation — say, mentioning summer plans or aspects about their family — it’s a chance to let curiosity take hold and ask follow-up questions. A curious person never runs out of things to talk about because they continuously pull on the threads that others leave. 

In my work as a facilitator, the deliberation guides often do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to creating new topics of conversation. However, I have also found that when the water is too still, and everyone seems to agree on a specific topic, pulling on the threads can often expose knots and tangles of underlying disagreements.  Like most of us, the participants within my D Teams had the polite tendency to brush over their contentions early on with the well-meaning intention of keeping the peace. In these situations, it’s necessary to directly bring up these contentious matters to have a more fulfilling discussion. My experiences have reinforced my belief that refraining from discussing disagreements entirely can be just as detrimental as talking about them unproductively.

Diving off the deep end into discussing controversial issues is easier said than done, which is why scaffolding these conversations can increase the longevity of the deliberation. I always enjoy hearing what my D Team participants say during the Getting to Know You portion, whether it’s hearing about their connection to Davidson or what time in history they’d travel back to. Although this section would be easy to skip over for time, it helps set the tone for the rest of the deliberation by establishing a semblance of understanding among deliberators. 

While it seems like one of the most mundane or trivial conversation topics, talking about the weather is widely and commonly used because it’s one of the easiest ways to find common ground with a conversation partner. Virtually anyone can talk about the weather because it’s something we all experience and have enough information to form opinions about. 

One thing that sets deliberations apart from debates is the intentional effort to find common ground with those you’re discussing with, acknowledging both areas of agreement and disagreement. Additionally, finding common ground in values can help participants trust one another and treat their fellow deliberators’ opinions with validity and respect, knowing that their differing beliefs still stem from a place of common principles. 

Furthermore, conversation goes beyond building relationships among individuals and can directly impact the effectiveness of our democracies. Robert Putman’s Making Democracy Work unpacks how reciprocal trust within communities is vital for maintaining working democratic systems because it increases the likelihood that those members will follow laws and exercise civic duties. His research in Italy showed that the most direct predictor of good democracies was the number of choral societies in the region. Although this may seem like a data analysis fluke, he goes on to explain that choral societies represent the presence of civic community: organizations that foster trust, shared responsibility, and social capital among their members. Increasing opportunities for individuals to regularly come together helps bolster each person’s stake in democracy. 

So the next time you’re on the way to class, take the extra minute to have a conversation with someone you pass, because that small connection means a step towards trust, which is a step toward democracy. 

By Jackson Strelo ‘26 (DCI Fellow)

Perhaps this is obvious, but one of our core human desires (or cravings, really) is control. Biologically and psychologically, it is an inherited desire central to survival, security, and mental health. While most humans no longer feel the need to engage with these biological risks to survival, they now primarily interact with the psychological pendulum, and one of these wrinkles of control entails a sense of control over what they know. This definitely tracks on a human level, as knowledge, especially in the information age, is assumed to be attached to important aspects of our life — our credentials, our salaries, our authority, and so forth.

However, on a higher level, our views on the world, influenced by what we think we know or personal values, are attached to our identities. Thus, it is natural to assume that threats to our knowledge have the potential to create a cascade of psychological costs, and an equal potential for responses to peers, loved ones, and society. These are important to tackle, for the ideals of open-mindedness that are preached in spaces of discourse cannot be realized without welcoming these small, or large, discomforts.

Another cost, loosely related to identity, is the social cost of updating beliefs. While this may be nullified in more private conversations, the threat of welcoming or accepting a new opinion by a peer, family member, or teammate may look like an act of capitulation to the “updater” that will be perceived by the group. Whether or not it matters to them that their partner in conversation changed their mind, in good faith or not, it may matter how they believe the “winning” belief party may react to this, or perhaps how their own belief party will treat them moving forward. Exhibit A: Congress, where political dissent has carried real career costs for representatives.

As mentioned earlier, costs to credibility are also a threat when weighing our beliefs. Unlike identity, credibility is more aligned with our purpose when it comes to evaluating one’s knowledge and opinions. For example, a parent may reinforce their purpose as a parent by providing reliable and effective guidance to their children. However, if someone or something threatens their concept of “correct” parenting, they may react by 1) taking a hit to their credibility, accumulated over years of life and parenthood invested into their children and 2) feeling a sense of failure towards the product of their purpose — their children.

While the examples provided may paint the picture of belief update costs as explicit and easily amenable, that’s far from the case. Another key feature of these costs is that while they manifest in impulses, they’re attached to beliefs that were heavily invested in — through education, relationships, trust, or even the confidence we’ve built in ourselves. Thus, it’s safe to say that these barriers against true open mindedness are difficult to just ignore, never pass completely, and exist everywhere. However, a better democracy doesn’t demand us to ignore our human instincts, but rather to lean into humanity.

The same investments I’ve just mentioned can be translated into a sort of “counter-investment”. The same way that successful New Years Resolutions are realized are almost fully attributable to the time investment associated with the desired goal or habit. Simply put, the most important part is just showing up, figuratively and literally. Practice “hearing them out” — actually listen to why that new experimental album was a masterpiece ahead of its time, why pineapple belongs on pizza (I’m still not buying this one, but I’ve forced myself to hear both sides), or any silly take that challenges what and who you attach yourself to. You may just hear yourself saying the words “I never thought about it that way before”.

However, I’ll end with an important caveat to this skill of belief-updating: the goal isn’t to become someone who changes their mind easily. Not only does that conclusion disagree with the aforementioned psychological tendencies of the human race, but it’s also simply not a fair expectation to place on yourself. You should care deeply about who you are and you should carry pride in your knowledge — it’s crucial for your mental health. The goal is to not let the occasional belief update chip away at those pillars. If more Americans could do so, perhaps there’d be less family feuds, less political violence, and more progress on the issues we all care about.

By Abi Barkley ’29 (DCI Fellow)

How Facilitating a Middle School Deliberation Helped Me Deliberate With Adults

When I mentioned that I wanted to host a deliberation with middle schoolers, I was met with the same question from almost everyone I told: “Are you sure?”

It was a fair question. Originally, I felt that teaching deliberation to middle schoolers would be a great way to give them some basic skills for having contentious conversations early on. But most of what DCI has done in the past has centered on college students or adult community members, and it’s only recently that we’ve started building programs that work with local high schools.

Middle school was, in many ways, uncharted territory. Because so much of what we do is centered around political topics, I understood going in that I might need to change not only the content but also the structure of the conversation.

I created this project with another DCI Fellow, Camryn Friedman ’27. Together, we decided to take the approach of deliberating on something that would feel relevant to the students’ actual lives at school, rather than jumping straight into national politics. We reasoned that this might be the closest equivalent to how adults engage with political topics: people tend to care most, and argue most passionately, about the things that touch their day-to-day lives directly. We also cut the length of the deliberation down from our usual two hours to just one, assuming that a group of 11-to-13-year-olds would need a shorter format to stay engaged. The group itself was composed entirely of boys, ages 11-13.

Underestimating Them From the Start

Going into this process, I assumed the students would be less willing to engage than the adults and college students we usually work with. To account for that, we built in a game component, borrowed from our own deliberation guide. For things like speaking for longer than a minute (but less than two), respectfully disagreeing with someone, sharing a personal story related to the topic, or bringing a new perspective into the conversation, participants could earn a piece of candy. The idea was to gamify participation just enough to lower the barrier to speaking up.

That game had to be scrapped almost immediately, not because it flopped, but because it wasn’t necessary. Our participants were so eager to contribute that we didn’t need an incentive system to get them talking; if anything, we needed tools to manage how much everyone wanted to say at once. It was a good problem to have, and it was the first sign that I had badly underestimated this group.

What surprised me even more was how quickly they picked up and started using the vocabulary of deliberation itself. We opened with a set of conversation agreements to be respectful, be a good listener, speak with purpose, assume the best about others, ask questions, practice empathy, avoid speaking in absolutes. The same ground rules we use with adult groups. I expected those norms to feel abstract or a little over their heads. Instead, the boys treated them almost like tools they could pick up and use immediately. One phrase in particular became a favorite of the group: “I respectfully disagree.” By the end of the hour, it wasn’t just a phrase we’d taught them — it was something they reached for naturally, almost competitively, as if using it correctly was its own small badge of honor.

Should Phones Be Allowed in School?

Our central question for the session was simple and, for this age group, immediately personal:

should students be allowed to bring their phones to class?

We laid out both sides for them the way we would for any deliberation. On one hand, phones can be legitimate educational tools — useful for research, note-taking, translation, calendars, and accessibility support for students with different learning needs. They can also double as safety tools, giving students a way to reach parents in an emergency or stay updated during the school day, which offers peace of mind for families. On the other side, phones can be disruptive and, some would argue, disrespectful to teachers who are trying to run a classroom. They’re a documented drain on attention spans, a vector for cyberbullying that can happen invisibly to parents, and a source of social comparison that can follow students into the one place that’s supposed to be a break from it.

What struck me was that the boys didn’t just repeat these talking points back at us, they complicated them. The boys who argued in favor of phones felt they should learn how to use them responsibly and that means having it but putting it away, while others who argued against pointed to cyberbullying and distraction with a level of specificity that surprised me, clearly drawing on things they’d actually seen happen to classmates. The conversation moved fast, and it moved with real conviction. They weren’t just talking and voicing an opinion for the sake of the exercise; they meant what they were saying.

Fun Is Not the Opposite of Serious

What I learned most from this group is that deliberation doesn’t need to be heavy to be meaningful, it can be genuinely fun. The fun also doesn’t have to come at the expense of substance. Most of our DCI deliberations focus on topics that carry a lot of weight: reparations, surveillance, criminal justice, the kinds of issues where people arrive with years of accumulated opinion and, often, some amount of guardedness. There’s a lot to be learned from the enthusiasm these boys brought to a conversation about something as ordinary as phone policy. They weren’t guarded at all. They just wanted to talk, and to be heard, and to win each other over.

That’s not to say the session was without friction. We had to intervene more than a few times to manage interruptions; when everyone wants to speak at once, and nobody’s especially worried about stepping on someone else’s sentence, the facilitator’s job shifts almost entirely toward traffic control. But if I had to choose between that problem and its opposite: a room where no one is willing to speak at all, I would take the interruptions every time. A conversation that’s too loud is still a conversation. A conversation where everyone is too afraid to say what they think isn’t a conversation at all; it’s a series of polite silences.

What This Means for How We Run Adult Deliberations

That contrast is what stuck with me the most, and it’s the question I keep returning to: how do we get participants in our standard DCI deliberations to feel as comfortable sharing their real opinions as these middle schoolers did?

In our usual sessions, I notice a recurring pattern: participants tend to stay on a theoretical level when voicing an opinion, rather than simply saying what they actually feel is right or wrong. I think a lot of that hesitation comes from a fear of appearing to violate the spirit of the ground rules, as if disagreement itself, rather than disrespect, were the thing we’re asking people to avoid. But that’s a misreading of what we’re trying to build. We don’t want participants to be unkind to one another, but genuine disagreement is the entire point of a deliberation. Without it, we’re not deliberating; we’re just taking turns being agreeable. And that disagreement needs to exist between the actual participants in the room, not just surface occasionally through a devil’s-advocate role played by the secondary facilitator, standing in for a position no one in the room is willing to claim as their own.

The middle schoolers didn’t have that hesitation. They hadn’t yet learned to hedge, to soften a position into vagueness so it couldn’t be challenged. When they disagreed, they said so, plainly, and reached for “I respectfully disagree” instead of silence. In a strange way, a room full of eleven-year-olds modeled something our adult deliberations often struggle to achieve: the willingness to actually mean what you say, and to trust that the room will hold that disagreement respectfully rather than punish it.

If I take one thing from this project into my future facilitation work, it’s that the tools we use to lower the stakes of disagreement, clear norms, a shared vocabulary, even something as small as a phrase like “I respectfully disagree” matter more than I gave them credit for. The middle schoolers didn’t need a devil’s advocate to manufacture disagreement, because they haven’t learned to be afraid of it yet. My job now is figuring out how to build that same freedom into rooms full of adults who have spent a lot longer learning the opposite lesson.

By Mary Molloy Blackstock ‘26 (DCI Fellow)

When I received my Spring 2026 D-Team assignments, I felt a mix of excitement and nerves. I had spent two summers working as a camp counselor, so I knew firsthand how complex and unpredictable working with 14, 15, and 16 year olds can be. 

Until recently, DCI’s work had focused primarily on Davidson students and members of the broader Davidson community. This spring, we decided to host a series of meetings with a group of local high school students. Bringing high schoolers into the process introduced a new dynamic entirely. There are logistical differences, of course, because we don’t record meetings when minors are involved, and the groups themselves are more contained, typically including only the students and one of their teachers. Beyond those structural changes, though, there was a deeper shift in how conversations unfolded.

I’ll admit that I had my doubts going in. I wasn’t concerned about the students themselves, but I was a little concerned about how the deliberations would compare. D Teams are usually formed to maximize the diversity of experiences in the room. They often include students, alumni, faculty, and community members in an attempt to include people who can bring different perspectives to the table. High school students, by comparison, have had less time to accumulate knowledge or lived experience. It’s easy to assume that this might limit the depth of conversation.

As I quickly realized, that assumption was very wrong. In fact, my high school D Team has been the most enriching group I’ve worked with so far. What struck me most was, more than just what they contributed, how they contributed. They exhibited a willingness to engage openly and without hesitation that changed the entire tone of the deliberation.

It made me reflect on something uncomfortable: as we get older, we tend to become more cautious in how we participate. We like to think that we’re open-minded, that we’re willing to learn and engage. To some extent, that’s true. But there’s a difference between being willing to listen and being willing to speak, especially when we’re unsure.

As a political science major, I often feel like I should have something particularly insightful or informed to say about the topics we discuss. At 21, though, I’m still very much learning. The problem is that I sometimes hesitate instead of just embracing that reality. I’m not the only one; I’ve seen the same pattern play out in classrooms and D Team meetings again and again. People hold back because they’re afraid of being wrong.

It’s an understandable instinct. No one wants to say something inaccurate or come across as ignorant. When that fear becomes the dominant force in a conversation, though, it limits participation. Even when people do speak, that hesitation lingers, shaping what they say and how they say it. The result is a kind of passive engagement where participants are present but not fully invested.

The high school students approached things differently. They didn’t filter every thought through a lens of potential error, they just jumped into the conversation feet first. They asked questions, shared opinions, challenged each other, and built on ideas in real time. Were all of their contributions perfectly accurate or deeply informed? Probably not, but that wasn’t the point.

What mattered was that they were actively participating in the process of deliberation, and because of that, the conversation felt alive in a way that many others don’t. Ironically, I left that session with more to think about than I have after many deliberations with older, more experienced participants. What made the difference was that the students were more willing to explore what they didn’t know.

That experience has made me reconsider what effective participation really looks like. Listening is essential, of course, but deliberation requires more than just listening. It requires a willingness to contribute, even when your thoughts are still forming.

So the next time you find yourself in a classroom, a meeting, or even a casual conversation, take a moment to reflect on how you’re engaging. Are you holding back because you’re unsure? Are you waiting until you feel “qualified” to speak?

Next time, try to accept the possibility of being wrong, and then choose to participate anyway. If there’s one thing those students reminded me, it’s that meaningful conversation isn’t about having all the right answers, it’s about being willing to enter the discussion in the first place.