This past year one faculty member experimented with including deliberative dialogue in a couple of courses. For example, one course this past spring involved students in learning how to name and frame public issues, write a discussion guidebooklet, and moderate public forums an effort that culminated in holding a series of four student-created and led forums for the campus at large on “”How to improve race and ethnic relations on campus?”" Students have written in glowing terms about their experience of learning this approach to citizenship and politics in these courses.
These very successful experiences with deliberation in the classroom have led to a plan by a team of faculty to pilot the integration of deliberative dialogue into several sections of our freshman seminar entitled “”Individual and Community.”" The revision of those experimental sections of the course is currently underway and will be launched in the fall 1999 semester. The plan includes teaching students the National Issues Forums (NIF) approach to moderating public forums as well as some of the theory behind deliberative democracy and the civic purposes of higher education. This will be supplemented with other reading material on diversity (race and ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual orientation) and some college life issues. While learning how to moderate forums, students will participate in forums in class on issues such as race relations, and the question of “”What kind of education do we need after high school?”" The culminating project will consist of teams of students leading forums for other freshman classes and members of the broader college community on the issue of controlling alcohol use on campus using the NIF booklet Alcohol: Controlling the Toxic Spill as our guide. The faculty teaching these sections will employ a pedagogical approach that alternates back and forth between the experience of deliberative dialogue and reflection on that experience that supplements, deepens, and extends it.
Addressing Issues of Diversity on Campus through Sustained Deliberation
The college is planning to adapt the National Issues Forums deliberative conversations model to address issues of diversity on campus more broadly in the next two years. We presently have a grant application before The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that outlines this plan and seeks their financial support. The integration of deliberative dialogue into the freshman seminar explained above is part of this larger project. In addition to the freshman deliberative dialogue initiative, we will assemble additional mini-teams of students, faculty, and staff to name and frame three diversity issues, write extensive issue books (that can be used on other college campuses that wish to engage their communities in dialogue on these issues), and hold a series of campus forums on each issue.
Discovering the Public Purposes of Education, Professional, and Personal Life
Beyond the two years of this particular project of using deliberative dialogue to address problems associated with diversity, we expect the practice of deliberation will become much more a part of our campus culture for students, faculty, and staff. This practice will begin to inform our campus interaction and discussion around many other problematic issues. We also expect to continue introducing this approach to civic discourse to our freshmen as a centerpiece of our civic-oriented general education curriculum. Further, as more and more faculty become familiar with this approach and its value, we hope that they integrate it into other courses they teach in the majors.
Experiencing public deliberation often in a variety of campus settings and as integrated into classes taught across the curriculum has the potential of changing the way students think about their liberal arts education and their later work as professionals. They will come to see how the liberal arts can make essential contributions to our abilities as humans to make good use of the life of freedom and to our efforts to make self-government result in good government. They will learn (along with the faculty and staff) that their expertise is part of a larger citizen process of addressing public problems and not the solution to them. Students will see this as they learn how to engage with the public to create public knowledge that can enhance and guide their professional expertise as well as give new, larger public meanings to their professional and personal lives.
