Creating Space for Democracy

A Primer on Dialogue and Deliberation in Higher Education

Timothy J. Shaffer, Nicholas V. Longo, Timothy J. Shaffer, Nicholas V. Longo

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781620369296
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación superior

This primer offers a blueprint for achieving the civic mission of higher education by incorporating dialogue and deliberation into learning at colleges and universities. It opens by providing a conceptual framework, with leading voices in the dialogue and deliberation field providing insights on issues pertinent to college campuses, from free speech and academic freedom to neutrality and the role of deliberation in civic engagement. Subsequent sections describe a diverse range of methods and approaches used by several organizations that pioneered and sustained deliberative practices; outline some of the many ways in which educators and institutions are using dialogue and deliberation in curricular, co-curricular, and community spaces, including venues such as student centers, academic libraries, and residence halls. This book is an important resource for campus leaders, student affairs practitioners, librarians, and centers of institutional diversity, community engagement, teaching excellence and service-learning, as well as faculty, particularly those in the fields of communication studies, education, and political science.
Published in Association with Campus Compact and AAC&U

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Discussing Democracy

Learning to Talk Together

Nicholas V. Longo and Timothy J. Shaffer

“You can’t solve a problem if you can’t talk about it,” observes Beverly Tatum, former president of Spelman College, in reflecting on the 20th anniversary edition of her bestselling book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (Kenney, 2017). The inability to discuss complex and divisive issues such as racism and segregation permeates our public life. We might shy away because we don’t want to offend people or say the wrong thing. Or we might be concerned that we don’t have “all the facts,” so we feel unprepared or uninformed. For many, it can be exhausting to face the constant need to explain a part of one’s identity or beliefs that might be marginalized or go against the norm. Even when we want to engage in these conversations, it’s difficult to know how to get the “right people” in the room or how to structure deliberative processes when we have so little practice in talking across differences. The resulting failure to engage in meaningful dialogue or sustained collaborative work means that public challenges go unaddressed.

This has to change. Rather than feeling powerless, we need to learn how to organize genuine dialogues that lead to productive action. As Peter Levine (2013) notes, to answer the fundamental question of civic studies—What should we do?—we need to work collectively to consider facts, values, and strategies. Facts are important because “we should not try to do something that is impossible, or redundant, or that has harmful but unintended consequences” (p. 25). We need values to distinguish between effective action that is “good” (e.g., the civil rights movement) and “bad” (e.g., fascist movements). Finally, Levine concludes, we need strategies: “It is insufficient to wish for better outcomes and determine that those outcomes are possible. We need a path to the desirable results” (p. 25). In short, we need to start talking with one another, and then turn these conversations into collective action. This book is about taking those first steps in order to make this happen on college campuses.

With the fraying of public life and the loss of community over the past decades, this collaborative engagement can’t happen soon enough. Confidence in major institutions has reached historic lows, while we face a growing number of intractable public problems—such as inequality, racism, climate change, and gun violence—that cannot be solved with technical fixes. Historically fringe voices are gaining strength and becoming more visible, while the engaged, democratic citizens¹ most needed to address problems are sidelined with diminished roles and expectations because of the professionalization of public life, among other factors (Dzur, 2017; McKnight, 1995).

Engagement among citizens, it should be noted, also too often contributes to the polarization threatening American democracy as echo chambers provide content that reinforces existing beliefs, isolating us even further from contrasting views. And, according to a recent Pew Research Center (2018) study, a growing majority of Americans (53% in 2018 versus 46% in 2016) now say that “talking about politics with people they disagree with” is generally “stressful and frustrating,” whereas a decreasing number (45% in 2018 versus 51% in 2016) say such conversations are usually “interesting and informative.” Given this context, it is difficult even to engage in civil discourse about issues that matter (Boatright, Shaffer, Sobieraj, & Young, 2019).

Higher education is not immune to these challenges. Colleges and universities serve as microcosms for democratic life and its discontents. It should come as no surprise that the fall 2016 entering cohort of first-time, full-time college students had the “distinction of being the most polarized cohort in the 51-year history” (Eagan et al., 2017, p. 4) of student surveys by the Higher Education Research Institute. Once a beacon of achievement, higher education is also increasingly seen with scorn; 61% of Americans say the U.S. higher education system is going in the wrong direction, according to a new Pew Research Center survey (Brown, 2018).

There is also a deep partisan divide around most issues connected with higher education, with a sharp rise—from 37% to 58% in just two years—in the number of Republicans saying that “colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country” (Fingerhut, 2017). By comparison, a wide majority of Democrats (72%) continue to view colleges and universities as having a positive effect (Fingerhut, 2017). Although there is some consensus about issues such as the negative impact of the high costs of college and the need for greater development of workforce skills, issues involving political discourse elicit wide partisan disagreement. For example, views on professors bringing their political and social views into the classroom diverge sharply, with 79% of Republicans saying it has a negative impact, compared with just 17% of Democrats. Similarly, 75% of Republicans see too much concern about protecting students from views they might find offensive, compared with 31% of Democrats (Brown, 2018). In this context, tensions around free speech and diversity and inclusion abound (Knight Foundation, 2019). With controversial speakers and counterprotests being stoked by national leaders and garnering a disproportionate amount of media attention, it can seem like our campuses are ground zero for polarization and the partisan culture wars. Yet these tensions are also missed opportunities for civic learning, which can be catalyzed through participatory, democratic processes such as dialogue and deliberation.

To feel safe to take risks and speak genuinely, people need to have the opportunity to participate in shared life in educative spaces that are humanizing, authentic, and productive. As the authors of Free Spaces (Evans & Boyte, 1992), The Great Good Places (Oldenburg, 1999), and Palaces for the People (Klinenberg, 2018) argue in unique but interrelated ways, places we might not first think of as sites for democratic discussion are essential to community life and social change. When describing what they call free space, third spaces, or social infrastructure, these scholars point to the importance of creating spaces in which ordinary people can share experiences, associate and organize, participate in public decision-making, and plan for collaborative action. Sometimes this process involves reconceptualizing familiar locations—such as libraries or barbershops—as civic spaces. Other times it utilizes locations away from everyday life, such as retreat centers and folk schools. Regardless, these types of spaces are essential to the healthy functioning of any society (Malena, 2015). Throughout history, free spaces have served as “seedbeds of democratic change in education and beyond” (Boyte, 2017), which then serve as training grounds for developing civic leadership among diverse groups of people working collectively to solve problems.

Using free spaces to cocreate knowledge offers an alternative to the dominant expertise paradigm of the academy. Much of the framework for teaching and learning is situated within a context in which the narrow technical expertise of a professor provides the sole basis for instruction. Dialogue and deliberation, however, build on the change from an instructional to a learning paradigm—an important conceptual shift in higher education that Robert Barr and John Tagg (1995) flagged almost 25 years ago. With this shift, colleges recognized their responsibility to “create environments and experiences that allow students to discover and construct knowledge for themselves and to become members of communities of learning that make discoveries and solve problems” (Barr & Tagg, 1995, p. 15). Since then, more active educational practices—what George Kuh (2008) refers to as “high-impact practices”—have grown through curricular interventions (e.g., first-year seminars, capstone courses, global learning) and classroom practices (intensive writing, undergraduate research, collaborative assignments), as well as through student life experiences (common intellectual experiences, learning communities) and off-campus engagement (internships, service-learning courses).

These are spaces where people interact with one another in ways that value the uniqueness and diversity of each other’s stories, experiences, and ideas. These spaces become invitations to “listen eloquently” to people with different backgrounds and views, to use a phrase from educator Herm...