The DCI Blog

The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 15 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. Throughout the 2021-22 academic year, these faculty, who come from a wide array of disciplines, studied and discussed different deliberative pedagogy methods, shared their ideas and questions with one another, and worked 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.

Having participated in the DCI program since it was launched here at Davidson, I looked forward to putting lessons learned into practice in a classroom setting. I’ve done theatrical, debate-like experiments in the past, but with the deliberative model brings with it a whole toolkit of methods and approaches.  A good opportunity presented itself with REL 236 The Bible and Modern Moral Issues, which is by nature more topical and contemporary than any of my other courses, which tend to be historical in nature. 

The course began by looking at some issues that we think of as non-controversial: the practice of human enslavement and colonialism. Of course, back in the day, these issues were hotly debated and the Bible was brought in on both sides. We looked at the arguments pro and con, the goal being to show students that the Bible doesn’t deliver any simple message on most ethical issues, and that the phrase, “the Bible says…” is quite problematic from a hermeneutical standpoint. 

We then looked at the Bible and homosexuality.  I decided to put this at the front end of the course because I did not want to treat it as a controversial issue. If there was an LGBTQ student in the course, they shouldn’t be made to feel as if their identity was being debated. This turned out to be somewhat complicated. There were a good number of conservative Christian students in the course for whom the issue was not settled at all. For them, it was just obvious that homosexuality was wrong and that the Bible condemned it. Even ten years ago, when I last taught the course, I hadn’t encountered this dynamic and it came as a surprise. I found this illuminating: the basic facts on the ground were not as expected when it came to this issue.

I was aided in thinking about this by the chapter, “Framing and Selecting Issues,” in The Political Classroom, one of the supplementary texts for the course that members of the DeeP Collaborative also read and discussed together. That chapter gives no simple guidance, but it does provide useful concepts and examples for thinking through the decision of whether to approach an issue as controversial or not.

We spent three and a half weeks learning about and practicing the process of deliberation, focused on three issues: 1) the Bible and Judaism, 2) the Bible and the environment, and 3) the Bible and abortion. We imagined ourselves as students at the Fictional Liberal Arts Bible College of the South (FLABCOS) confronting problems and policy questions as they arose. 

For purposes of illustration, here’s the first prompt. 

A group of students at FLABCOS has started a chapter of Jews for Jesus. They’ve taken to hanging around the local synagogue on the Sabbath passing out literature and trying to engage people in conversation about Jesus. Rabbi Schneerson confronts one of the students and asks them to stop. The student responds by saying that their faith requires them to do this, quoting Acts 4:12: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” Another student brings up John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” A third student sounds a more ominous note: “it says right here in the Gospel of Matthew (27:25) that when Pilate was willing to let Jesus go, the crowd of Jews insisted that he be crucified, saying “let his blood be on us and our children!” (Mt. 27:25). But it also says in the Book of Acts (4:10-12) that God has graciously offered Jews forgiveness as long as they confess faith in Jesus. They end by referring the Rabbi to the Jews for Jesus website.  

The Rabbi sends a note to the President of FLABCOS, objecting to this student group and their aggressive approach to his congregation. He claims that FLABCOS should not be underwriting such a group (like student orgs at Davidson, the FLABCOS JFJ branch receives school money). The President of FLABCOS, Bob Johnson III, turns the issue over to the WDBS (What Does the Bible Say) Task Force.  

Your report to the president should include arguments on both sides of the issue, together with references to scripture and a policy recommendation. 

This last piece—the policy move—was one of the most helpful things tactics from the DCI experience. Ending with a joint statement or policy recommendation forces compromise and convergence. 

I conjured up a similar scenario with FLABCOS for the deliberation on environmentalism and that seemed to go well.

The deliberation on abortion coincided almost exactly with the leaked draft of the Supreme Court ruling on Hobbs and that raised the stakes considerably on that discussion. The fun fiction of FLABCOS seemed ill-suited to the gravity of the situation. We took some extra time to do additional readings to those listed in the syllabus. This deliberation was more fraught.  

At the end of the course, I had originally planned for students to take up a moral/ethical issue of their own choice, but I changed plans on hearing about an incident here on the Davidson campus. A Christian group had invited an assistant coach to address one of their meetings, but when it became clear that the coach was gay, the invitation was rescinded, because the national group of which the Davidson group was a chapter had a policy on the books that explicitly denounced same-sex sexual relations.  This led to a split within the group, with some students splitting off to form an alternative group. We took the opportunity to use this incident as the final occasion for deliberation. 

For their final project, I had students revisit the biblical materials and secondary readings we had consulted earlier in the semester and imagine themselves as a member of the Campus Community and Religious Life Committee, writing up a description of the event along with their recommendations for action, addressed to incoming president Doug Hicks. 

In general, we achieved a high level of frankness and fellow-feeling in this course, more than probably any other than I’ve taught here at Davidson in 23 years. I will definitely integrate deliberative elements into future courses.

 

The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of 15 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. Throughout the 2021-22 academic year, these faculty, who come from a wide array of disciplines, studied and discussed different deliberative pedagogy methods, shared their ideas and questions with one another, and worked 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.

One of the main aspects of deliberation in the classroom that I have returned to and explored throughout the process of adapting Political Ecology into a deliberation course and reflecting on this process in small and large group sessions with other ACS faculty, is an embedded tension in the idea of the political classroom. This tension rests, on the one hand, on the theoretical ideal of the political classroom as a deliberative space where students can voice all perspectives—as though each is equal and valid to one another. The readings we did for our deliberative pedagogy workshop emphasized the classroom as a “political” space, one that operates in service of producing citizens who can participate in democratic life by contemplating questions about how we should, or ought, to live.

My own research, and therefore the classes that I teach, grapple with how race, gender, and class shape what gets marked and classified as “other” and in so doing can produce a myriad of oppressions and marginal communities. I focus on how expert knowledge supports and justifies the categorization of legal or criminal practice in relation to the environment, and how colonial categorizations produced environmental and social struggles with which we now grapple. 

Classrooms, as one of many spaces of knowledge transmission, are inherently political spaces, because not only do they implicitly or explicitly assert what is normal, or standard, but they do so in service of maintaining order and disciplining bodies and practices in service of the state. Answering questions of should or ought therefore requires an implicit definition of what should not or what ought not, which tends to exclude those who are from specific groups and/or practice particular actions, denying them the necessary precondition of personhood so that they cannot participate in democratic processes.

To treat a classroom as a political space where questions of how we should or ought to live are weighed in a neutral manner seemed, initially, incongruent with the understanding that “Othered” people continue to be harmed both in the classroom and in institutions of higher learning, as well as in the political sphere where they might attempt to participate in the democratic life of citizens, and therefore requires a breakdown of neutrality—at least from one of my perspectives as a scholar-activist. 

From the very beginning of DeeP, I was anxious about how I would balance and navigate this tension, how my decisions might shape the classroom deliberations, and how they might affect whether and/or how students feel included, safe, and comfortable enough to actively participate and engage with opposing, and perhaps even dehumanizing, ideas. I was committed to DeeP, however, because I do strongly believe that deliberation can serve as a means for instilling, if nothing else, a sense of empathy, connection, and care for others and therefore, it has the potential to further inclusivity and engagement in the classroom, while also producing individuals who can participate better in democratic processes. 

I attempted to address my concerns by choosing case studies that were written by scholars who were trained to understand the operations and manifestations of power, as they are shaped by and as they shape race, class, and gender and sexuality. I also did a lot of reverse engineering so that I focused on the objectives of the assignments, rather than just on the content of the case studies themselves. 

In so doing, I decided that I needed students to do the following: 1) examine and apply the theories we were learning in class that would allow them to understand processes of marginalization; 2) understand how processes of marginalization are implicated in the production of environmental harms or poor resource management practices; 3) how practices designed to bolster community participation can result in either better representation or worse representation, depending on who is “at the table”; and 4) develop well-researched stakeholder positions that are supported by the published literature, challenge their personal perspectives, and respect the complexity and nuance of stakeholder groups. 

Throughout the semester, my students consistently remarked that the deliberation role playing exercises were their favorite activities. Their engagement with the course increased significantly during these weeks and they also played their stakeholder positions out to their most logical conclusions, while also engaging with more nuanced and complex perspectives. Rather than treat their stakeholders as a homogenous block with a single perspective, they explored the at-times contradictory positions of those who might be grouped into a single stakeholder group and had to negotiate outcomes accordingly. What does it mean for an elected leader of an indigenous group to have to navigate different factions within their constituent group that are advocating for different policy options? How does one resolve the tensions between poaching and legal hunting given the colonial and racialized legacies embedded within historical and contemporary conservation practice? How might access to potable water be a human right and governed as a commodity within a market system?

Overall, I think it was a success. I still have some reservations about these tensions, but insofar as I am clear about the objectives of the assignments, as well as the specific skillsets that I want students to walk away from the class having developed, I was pleased with their progress, demonstrated learning, and engagement. I will continue to develop deliberative role-playing exercises in Political Ecology, creating a “bank” of case studies that I can draw on from year to year, and potentially, even begin to co-produce with students. I may also begin to utilize them more in my introductory core course, Environmental Social Science, as a way to begin to bridge environmental studies, policy, and critical race, class, feminist, and gender and sexuality theory.