The DCI Blog

By Dan Aldridge (Chair & Professor of Africana Studies, Professor of History, DeeP Collaborative Member)

The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 20+ faculty from Davidson College and five other Associated Colleges of the South 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. They come together to study and discuss different 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.

I agreed to participate in the Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Collaborative because I wanted to improve the quality of student engagement with major issues in American history without fear of facing and expressing a wide range of points of view and to encourage their development as citizens who will be engaged in public issues in the decades to come.  I teach a course that is an introduction to 20^th century US History aimed primarily and 1^st and 2^nd year students.  I focused the course on four broad “issues”: The United States’ emergence as an imperial power and future world power at the beginning of the 20th century; the life and career of Margaret Sanger as a way of exploring issues involving feminism, birth control, eugenics and related issues; varying interpretations of the meanings of the civil rights movement of the 1960s; and the different views of liberals and conservatives about the direction of American life since the 1960s.

After we finished readings, lectures, and discussions about each issue I would assign groups of students to hold a debate about the issues raised.  For example, I asked one group of four students to support the United States’ becoming an imperial and global power in the early 20^th century while another group of four argued the anti-imperialist position.  After each side made its presentation the remaining students in the course would ask questions of the two debate teams.  Finally, the class as a whole would discuss the issues raised.  I have found from in-class observation, student comments, and student evaluations that they greatly enjoyed the debates and found them to be pedagogically valuable.  The debate/discussion format seems to enable students to take historical issues that seemingly belong in the “past” come alive and become more relevant to them and their contemporary lives.

Students also reacted well to reading a wide variety of points of view about historical issues including perspectives from the Right, Left, and Center.  Students read strongly pro-imperialist and somewhat racialist arguments for imperialism by authors such as Theodore Roosevelt; they read scathing critiques for US foreign policy from the Left by Noam Chomsky; they watched African American conservative intellectual Thomas Sowell critique much of the conventional wisdom about race and rights held by liberals and progressives; and they read Jeanne Theoharis argue that our understanding of civil right activism of the 1960s understates its radicalism.  They also read Catholic writers who strongly critiqued birth control, abortion and feminism as well as feminist authors who strongly supported those things.

I found that students were not angered or intimidated by being exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints, including many that would not be currently deemed to be “correct” or “polite.”  Indeed, a number commented on how they liked that the course was open to a wide variety of opinions and not committed to promoting a particular ideology or point of view.  I plan to incorporate more elements in deliberative discussion in other courses I teach where needed and appropriate.

The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 20+ faculty from Davidson College and five other Associated Colleges of the South 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. They come together to study and discuss different 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 Bassil El-Zaatari (Assistant Professor of Chemistry, DeeP Collaborative Member)

Plastic pollution remains one of the largest challenges facing us in today’s world. Met with an ever-growing population, the use of plastic materials continues to flourish with limited ability to recycle and reprocess these materials. In fact, projections now show that by the year 2050, there may be more plastic in the ocean than fish. As I embarked on teaching polymer chemistry for the first time this semester at Davidson College, I knew I had to balance what I was teaching from a scientific perspective with thoughtful understandings of the socioeconomic, political, and historical implications of the synthesized materials discussed in class. Through the Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Collaborative, I set up a framework of discussions and readings throughout the semester that culminated in a final “debate” activity during the last week of class.

On the first day of class, I explained to my students that it is critical for us, as current and future scientists, to address STEM-related controversial modern issues including stem cell research, climate change, energy policy, and pollution levels. I made sure they understood that while the ubiquity of polymers and plastics in everyday life has been critical to human advancement, the waste generated from plastic waste has been detrimental to ecosystems, especially aquatic life, and its landfill and incineration has been linked to worsening climate change.

Throughout the semester, I tried to link topics that we were learning about to broader issues and local events. One example that comes to mind was after the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio that was carrying vinyl chloride, a precursor to synthesize polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a widely utilized plastic material. We chatted about the environmental implications of this polymer precursor from the spillage as well as methods that could have prevented it. We discussed what type of socioeconomic impacts that this derailment will have on the area for years to come and whether the need to synthesize PVC outweighed its potential hazards during manufacturing and post synthesis.

As the semester was coming to an end, the final debate tasked the students to come up with the best approach to the following prompt:

“You and your team have been appointed to solve the plastic pollution problem by world leaders from all over the world. You will have to come up with a plan of action using your polymer chemistry knowledge. You will have to decide where to start from in tackling this problem and present your findings to the class.”

This prompt was supplemented by several articles, both from scientific journals and periodicals, that the students had to read prior to the start of the activity, as well as a special topic lecture that discussed current methods of plastic recycling and reprocessing. While debating this topic, the students were prompted to keep the following questions in mind:

(1) How can we balance the importance of polymers and plastics with the waste generated from not being able to recycle, reprocess and reuse most of them?
(2) Can we reach a world in which plastic waste is a thing of the past?
(3) Does plastic free actually mean pollution free?

The activity was split into two 75-minute class periods. During the first session of the debate, the students were separated into four small groups (consisting of three or four students each) and were prompted to arrive at an evidence-supported position on this topic while weighing pertinent scientific, socioeconomic, and political implications. I walked around the different groups, listened to their conversations, and helped facilitate discussions. The students felt passionate about their positions and worked hard to convince their groupmates of the best approach to this problem, while keeping an open mind and listening to others.

Towards the end of the class period most groups had agreed on a plan of action to present during the next session. In the second session, the groups presented their findings to their classmates. Each presentation was up to ten minutes long and was followed by 5 to 10 minutes of questions from the rest of the class. I was impressed by the elegance in the solutions the classmates produced and the intensity of the Q&A session that followed.

Overall, I would say that the activity was a success and the students left the semester with a sense of scientific intersectionality that they may have not encountered in previous STEM classes. The students seemed to enjoy the activity and were passionate about their positions and defending them to others. The use of deliberation in future chemistry classes is something I intend to implement and improve on.