Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life

Four Seasons of Deliberative Learning (2008)

123 four seasons of deliberative learning () From  to , I set out on a systematic journey to incorporate deliberative democracy and deliberative learning practices into a sequence of three new courses I developed in an interdisciplinary department of rhetoric and American Studies. The courses covered a full gamut of undergraduate teaching assignments, from a general-education requirement to a senior capstone project. This essay is partly a description of some of the techniques I tried out along the way, partly a lab report on the outcomes of the experiments I conducted, and partly a travelogue about the highs and lows of the journey—the exhilarating discoveries I made, the company I kept, as well as the wrong turns I took and jams I got into. Each of the experimental classes along that journey is distinguished by a pedagogy that cross-fertilizes active learning techniques, principally service learning, and deliberative democratic practices, such as public forums, study circles, and civic engagement opportunities for students. Taken as a whole, my journey shows, I hope, that the synergy between deliberation and active learning can energize the undergraduate humanities classroom at all levels, even the senior capstone. Moreover, I bring away from these travels two key, but by no means original, insights into the value of deliberation and the Learning in the Plural 124 challenge, as Daniel Yankelovich puts it, of “making democracy work in a complex world” such as ours. Democracy itself, I rediscovered, is fundamentally a rhetorical art. And deliberation, the discursive engine of democracy, can be a powerful, compelling, even transformative pedagogy that challenges students and teachers alike to connect principles, ideas, and critical reflection—the usual and venerable fare of the humanities classroom—to the crucible of lived community problems in which ordinary citizens conduct the extraordinary work of citizenship. SETTING OUT: A TOEHOLD IN GENERAL EDUCATION In the late 1990s, several colleagues and I organized the Service Learning Writing Project, a curriculum development and research initiative in service learning and composition studies. By yoking together rigorous classroom writing instruction, critical readings in American civic culture, and real-world writing projects in community, municipal, and nonprofit agencies, we found that students developed more complex understandings of the crucial role of language and critical thinking skills in the work of social and political change. We eventually established a new writing course in 1999—Public Life in America—which fulfills a general-education writing requirement and currently enrolls nearly three hundred students a year in twelve stand-alone sections.1 During the last few years, inspired largely by my participation in a Kettering Foundation work group, my interest has turned to the relationship between rhetoric and democratic practices and, in particular, to how deliberative democracy techniques might be used for teaching, writing, and critical thinking. Through continuing conversations and alliances with my colleagues at Kettering, I learned that the best way to promote a robust democracy is to encourage public deliberation of controversial issues, foster strong communities, and help promote citizens’ civic, rather than professional identities. In the case of our students and higher education , this meant that to strengthen what Harry Boyte calls America’s “civic Deliberative Learning 125 muscle” we had to practice deliberative democracy in our classrooms and on our campuses. I began experimenting, then, with methods of connecting the rhetorical and critical thinking requirements of my university’s general-education writing course with Kettering’s traditions of deliberative democracy and with the particular methodology of public conversation and problem solving practiced in hundreds of National Issues Forums (NIF) taking place across the country. All these strands came together in 2002 when my colleague Eric Fretz and I designed a pair of closely related experimental writing courses in the general-education sequence that would provide students with opportunities to study techniques of deliberation and to practice both public dialogue and public problem solving. These two courses were not team-taught in the traditional sense. Fretz was scheduled to teach a writing section with a focus on Race and Ethnicity, and I was assigned a Public Life in America class with a special emphasis on education and youth issues. We each designed our own syllabus, although there was a good deal of overlapping of required texts, learning strategies, and writing assignments. Our classes incorporated three active learning components, which we designed to link the academic issues of the separate courses, foster a strong learning community between our classes and...