{"id":4362,"date":"2024-09-13T15:32:30","date_gmt":"2024-09-13T15:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deliberativecitizenship.org\/?p=4362"},"modified":"2024-12-19T07:05:20","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T07:05:20","slug":"tackling-difficult-conversations-in-the-classroom-sport-as-a-barrier-breaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deliberativecitizenship.org\/blogposts\/tackling-difficult-conversations-in-the-classroom-sport-as-a-barrier-breaker\/","title":{"rendered":"Tackling Difficult Conversations in the Classroom: Sport as a Barrier-Breaker"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The\u00a0Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative<\/a>\u00a0consists 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When you really think about it, many parts of our lives can be understood through the lens of sports metaphors, analogies, and idioms. We \u201cfall short of the goal line,\u201d we \u201cdrop the ball,\u201d and we view life as \u201ca marathon, not a race.\u201d Political discourse uses sports metaphors even more frequently. We tune in to \u201chorse race\u201d news coverage of political campaigns, we analyze offensive and defensive strategy, and \u2013 of course \u2013 we view political parties as rival teams vying to win over voters or maintain loyalties. That brings me to what this blog and the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative are about: public discourse and deliberation, particularly in the context of pedagogical practices in the college classroom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a teacher-scholar of communication and rhetoric whose topic specialty is sports culture, not only am I fascinated by what sports metaphors can and can\u2019t do in public discourse, but I also wanted to experiment with it further in my sports communication course, truly putting the \u201cmeta\u201d in \u201cmetaphor.\u201d Specifically, as part of the Davidson Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative through the DCI, I sought to infuse deliberative pedagogy into my class and cultivate a \u201cpractice field for democracy.\u201d I encouraged my students \u2013 which included student athletes and non-student athletes \u2013 to view their deliberative skill development as akin to individual athletes and teams training to compete in their sporting endeavors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet in my classroom, they are practicing deliberative skills to productively engage when it\u2019s politically \u201cgame time\u201d \u2013 around the Thanksgiving table, in their next class, or in a public context. To practice, we utilize the subject matter of sports and sports communication. Although historically dismissed as the \u201ctoy department\u201d of society (and media specifically),<\/a> what happens on and off the field in the world of sports has a lot more to do with political culture than many students realize. And that\u2019s at the heart of the weekly deliberations I implemented throughout the semester.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My Sports Communication (COM 269) course at Lenoir-Rhyne University, which is offered every spring, has exposed majors and non-majors alike to the important ideas of debate and deliberation in the specific context of sports \u2013 a context that is immensely accessible for students to engage in critical discussion about issues of public importance. And yet, I hadn\u2019t made these skills explicit in learning outcomes or assessment. When I applied for the Deliberative Pedagogy cohort, I intended to revise my course to make it more deliberative from top to bottom. That is exactly what I did. First, I include two formal learning outcomes focused on deliberation. Second, I redesigned the major assignments to align with those outcomes. Finally, I incorporated deliberation and rhetoric frameworks throughout the semester, including work on the\u00a0relationship among democracy, rhetoric, and athletics in Ancient Greece<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Concepts from the deliberative pedagogy literature helped us determine what topics and behaviors were \u201cin bounds,\u201d for our practices; rhetorical frameworks served as the equipment students would use while we tackled different issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deliberative Learning Outcomes and Assessment\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n