The DCI Blog

One course I teach at UNC Charlotte is a lower-division general education course, “Critical Thinking and Communication,” specifically offered for students in the University Honors Program. The class size typically ranges between 15 and 20 students, and the variety of life experiences and racial, gendered, cultural, and religious identities in the room offer rich opportunities for students to engage and learn from each other across difference. Because I come from a humanities background (English literature), I have typically taught college writing seminars and critical thinking courses with a set of short, thought-provoking readings and other materials to stimulate new ways of thinking and writing. While I kept this practice for a part of the course this semester, I also incorporated an emphasis on the notion of public discourse and deliberation, with support from the DeeP Collaborative colleagues – particularly through our “G2” subgroup and discussions with my partner, Rebecca Alt. 

Although facilitating class discussion is something I have experience with, deliberation was a new topic to me as a teacher. While making that reality clear to my students, I also introduced them to the purposes and elements of deliberative engagement with readings, diagrams, and concepts I learned from and alongside the DeeP Collaborative. This material, which included essays such as Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse’s chapter on “Why We Argue,” and Martin Carcasson’s writings on “wicked problems,” offered a view of the stakes and techniques we were setting out to examine, and practice. My students were exposed to the Kaner model and deliberative dispositions; then, they began to connect their own prospective inquiry topics together as they assembled, midway through the course, into “D-Teams.” These D Teams are similar to but distinct from the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative’s D Teams, which are groups of students and non-students that meet outside of class to discuss different topics.  

Composed of four students apiece, the D-Teams in my class addressed the following thorny questions: What role should taxpayers have in municipal decisions about large-scale sports and entertainment events? How can public health be made more accessible? How can the government best represent the local people it serves? How can AI and other technological innovations be reconciled with environmental sustainability? And, what should 21st century parenting look like in the United States?  

Each of these questions emerged from four or more peers’ independently researched inquiry projects (a campus requirement for this general education course). What I noticed, and did not plan, was that the choice of a fruitful topic for deliberation itself was, in this context, a first occasion for deliberation. The Community Agreements collectively established by the class during the first week of the semester helped arrange some ground rules relevant to all of our deliberations, and my students also were able to watch a video of a practice deliberation.  

Here, I was grateful to have the chance to collaborate with four DeeP Collaborative colleagues: my fellow Honors College staff member Mindy Adnot, and three College of Education faculty: Danyeal Morrison, Michelle Stephan, and Nick Triplett. Our practice deliberation (on the subject of poverty and meritocracy) was not perfect by any means – in fact, we all agree that it left a lot of room for improvement. However, it provided a good chance for my students to observe a deliberation in action and offered a picture of several “moves” that students could employ in deliberations of their own making. 

As their deliberation dates approached, each D-Team assembled from their inquiry projects a set of relevant discussions that developed into their official Deliberation Guide. This three-purpose document provided a training ground for the D-Team, an overview of the stakes and relevant subtopics for the audience (the rest of the class), and an array of provocative questions for the facilitator.  

To permit me to evaluate deliberations as a more detached observer, I recruited and trained two bright students – who were not in the class – during a short session that featured Steve Kalisky’s video demonstration of facilitation styles, clips from the practice deliberation with my DeeP colleagues, and a set of recommended readings (Carcasson, etc.). When the time for deliberations took place, participants were evaluated on three areas: 1) their sustained support for a particular stance on the issue; 2) their respectful, concise, and relevant responses to peers’ comments; and 3) their recruitment of material in their group’s deliberation guide. A fourth area for evaluation consisted of a written reflection on the experience: opportunities, challenges, and take-aways. 

Altogether, the implementation of deliberative pedagogy in this honors course made good sense and gained traction among students through the readings, exercises, and ultimately the deliberative sessions themselves. I’ll be doing my own reflections and listening to and reading over my DeeP Collaborative peers’ experiences to inform some fine-tuning ahead of the next time I teach the course, and as I share my own experience with colleagues across campus. 

Though I did not always have the language to describe it as such, I have long relied on deliberative pedagogy as a framework both for modeling philosophical inquiry inside the classroom and for imparting the critical, interrogative, and evaluative skills required for responsible and reciprocal civic engagement. My approach to teaching has always been shaped by a commitment to foster a space of shared inquiry in which all perspectives and social positionalities are avenues rather than barriers to understanding. It is critical that my students recognize themselves as participants and co-creators of our collective learning experience, and that they approach the study of philosophy as an invitation into an ongoing dialogue of which we are all a part. 

To this end, I encourage my students to engage with philosophy deliberatively, as an always-unfinished, critical enterprise that is open to a constant questioning of the norms, assumptions, and premises of that which we have long taken for granted. By approaching philosophy this way, we are reminded that we are limited in our capacity to know, and that reciprocal engagement with others—and especially those whose lived experiences are far different from our own—is what enables us to see the blind spots in our thinking, brings to light questions that we may not have considered, and opens up avenues for new modes of knowing. This kind of critical, philosophical ethos is one that is genuinely self-reflective, governed by intellectual humility, and attentive to the historicity of the present. 

This approach to philosophy has served me and my students well in this last academic year. As a social and political philosopher, all of my courses—no matter the topic—engage with issues of power, and therefore with issues at the forefront of our concern as social and political beings. My responsibility, as I understand it, is to provide the tools and cultivate the space that enables my students to take on these issues with care. I do not set aside class days for formal, deliberative exercises, but incorporate them into every aspect of our classroom experience: we deliberate over the meaning of the text, giving reasons for why we interpret certain passages in certain ways; we deliberate over the tenability of arguments, both on their own terms and in relation to the lived present; we deliberate over how an author’s framework of analysis can help us make sense of the crises of our day, and where they cannot. The Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative has enabled me to better articulate these dimensions of my pedagogy.

By way of example, one new strategy that I employed for the first time this semester was to include specific “discussion questions” in my syllabus as a means of guiding students as they did the readings for our class. In my freshman-level course entitled “Aesthetics and Political Resistance,” which met once a week for three hours, I devised a series of inquiries under each set of readings that were intended to give students specific themes to focus on and which they would be expected to deliberate about during our meetings. Inevitably, however, students would take our conversations beyond those I imagined us to have, and I understood my responsibility in those moments to explore how our readings could shed light on their concerns. As the semester progressed, some of my students connected our themes—which included the aesthetic reproduction of the status quo, the role of aesthetic feelings in destabilizing social norms, and so forth—to the events unfolding around us, both abroad as well as on our campus. 

Given the extremely polarized nature of these events, disagreements were unavoidable—and for this reason, several of my colleagues preferred to shut down such conversations entirely. Yet in an era where the rhetoric of “civility” is increasingly deployed to censor critical speech, these moments of disagreement are perhaps the most significant for us as pedagogues. They have reminded me that responsible deliberative pedagogy demands that we understand where our students are coming from, so that we can better put competing viewpoints into constructive dialogue and translate disagreements into learning opportunities. In other words, it requires that we cultivate a critical ethos in ourselves just as much as we try to cultivate it in our students. I am grateful to the Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative for giving me the space to deeply reflect on this responsibility.