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169 pages

English

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This book, edited by Kettering Foundation Vice President and Program Director John Dedrick along with Laura Grattan and Harris Dienstfrey, demonstrates how deliberation can help higher education renew its mission of preparing citizens to sustain democracy and stimulate civic involvement on college campuses around the country. It also describes how deliberative dialogue-in both the classroom and on campus-can promote learning and problem solving amidst a culture of argument, debate, and polarization that is prevalent on campus and in society. First and foremost, however, it is a book about the possibilities of deliberation and the ways in which teachers and administrators can adapt it to their instructional and organizational goals.

Sujets

Higher education

Informations

Publié par	Kettering Foundation
Date de parution	01 janvier 2008
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781945577260
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0474€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Deliberation & the Work of Higher Education
Innovations for the Classroom, the Campus, and the Community
© 2008 by the Kettering Foundation
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Deliberation & the Work of Higher Education: Innovations for the Classroom, the Campus, and the Community is published by Kettering Foundation Press. The interpretations and conclusions contained in this book represent the views of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, its directors, or its officers.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:
Permissions
Kettering Foundation Press
200 Commons Road
Dayton, Ohio 45459
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
First edition, 2008
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN Number: 978-0-923993-25-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007939255
Contents
Introduction:
Creating New Spaces for Deliberation in Higher Education
by Laura Grattan, John R. Dedrick, and Harris Dienstfrey
SECTION I: Deliberation and Enlarging Student Perspectives
Chapter One:
From “Youth Ghettos” to Intergenerational Civic Engagement: Connecting the Campus and the Larger Community
by Michael D’Innocenzo
Chapter Two:
Introducing Deliberation to First-Year Students at a Historically Black College/University
by Lee Ingham
SECTION II: Deliberation in the Liberal Arts Curriculum
Chapter Three:
Individual and Community: Deliberative Practices in a First-Year Seminar
by Joni Doherty
Chapter Four:
The Deliberative Writing Classroom: Public Engagement and Aristotle in the Core Curriculum at Fordham University
by Maria Farland
Chapter Five:
Four Seasons of Deliberative Learning in a Department of Rhetoric and American Studies: From General Education to the Senior Capstone
by David D. Cooper
SECTION III: Deliberation in Professional Education
Chapter Six:
Reinventing Teacher Education: The Role of Deliberative Pedagogy in the K-6 Classroom
by Cristina Alfaro
Chapter Seven:
Learning about Deliberative Democracy in Public Affairs Programs
by Larkin S. Dudley and Ricardo S. Morse
SECTION IV: Deliberation and the Campus Community
Chapter Eight:
Deliberation, Civic Discourse, and Democratic Dialogue in the Context of Academic Change
by Douglas J. Walters
Chapter Nine:
Deliberation and the Fraternal Futures Initiative
by Dennis C. Roberts and Matthew R. Johnson
SECTION V: Deliberation and Civic Education: A Four-Year Study
Chapter Ten:
Contexts for Deliberation: Experimenting with Democracy in the Classroom, on Campus, and in the Community
by Katy J. Harriger and Jill J. McMillan
Chapter Eleven:
Notes and Reflections on Being a Democracy Fellow at Wake Forest University
by Allison N. Crawford

Afterword:
Who Else Cares?
by David Mathews
Introduction

Creating New Spaces for Deliberation in Higher Education

Laura Grattan, John R. Dedrick, and Harris Dienstfrey
T hough it may not be widely recognized, American colleges and universities are home to robust cultures of innovation that are redefining our approaches to teaching, to research, to service, and to learning—and, in the process, reinvigorating the larger public and democratic purposes of academic life. Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland have persuasively characterized these innovations as part of a broad civic renewal movement in the United States; institutions of higher education, college and university presidents, administrators, faculty, and students, are again embracing their roles as “architects of a flourishing democracy.”
The most successful of these efforts variously involve students, faculty, and administrators seeking to connect their vocations and their personal interests with public life. Harry Boyte, in Everyday Politics , reports that his discussions with faculty and administrators, in fields ranging from family therapy to architecture, reveal a hunger to reconnect academic disciplines and professional practice with the “public work” of citizenship and politics. The Wingspread statement on student civic engagement, The New Student Politics , observes that many college students seek a “richly participatory” politics that ties their individual interests and experiences to the service of public problems. And Cynthia Gibson, in her report, From Inspiration to Participation , for the Carnegie Corporation, writes that the academy’s four major approaches to civic engagement—civic education, service learning, youth development, and political action—all reflect higher education’s efforts to “balance meeting the needs of youth with achieving larger educational, community, and societal goals.” 1
Given these trends, it is not altogether surprising that recent empirical evidence presents students today as more civically engaged than they were 15 years ago and savvier about their engagement. As the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) report Millenials Talk Politics argues, while college students remain ambivalent about politics-as-usual, especially in the forms they equate with media spin and polarized debates, many do seek opportunities to discuss public issues in what they would find more authentic terms and to organize people to address such issues. Many are finding what they consider the most reliable opportunities for engagement in their local communities. 2
Yet large challenges remain. Tuition costs are skyrocketing, with the result that the requisite knowledge for today’s information society is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands; parents and students who can afford higher education are therefore taking an increasingly consumer approach; and many colleges and universities appear content to capitalize on these trends rather than challenge them. 3 Any resurgence of civic engagement exists within a higher education environment that remains beset by the enduring problems of American democracy in our times—most notably, cultures of expertise and money and organized special interests that continue to sideline and estrange citizens.
For those who gain access to higher education, the new initiatives to reconnect with public life counter a prevailing culture of hyperprofessionalism in the academy, which stresses career training and competition among students, while urging faculty into narrower and narrower paths of disciplinary research. These myopic aims are part of what William Sullivan identifies as the ethos of “instrumental individualism” that governs higher education today. Economic interests, he says, and the pursuit of individual advancement have largely replaced broader “questions of social, political, and moral purpose” among students and professionals who inhabit academic institutions and aspire to leadership positions in society. When complex issues are tackled within the walls of the academy, its entrenched “argument culture” rewards criticism and adversarial modes of discourse at the expense of real dialogue about ideas and values. 4
The argument culture with its attendant polarizing discourse effectively excludes many students who do not see themselves in the stylized rancor of a politics that mirrors the popular vernacular of a world in which the public ethos is not about learning how to live together but about “voting off the island” those whom we dislike or disagree with. Such an environment leaves very little space and develops few alternative practices for serious engagement with concerns that are necessarily multisided and involve coexisting claims about what should be done. Nor does it guarantee the existence of spaces in which students can experience the deliberative and dialogic practices that offer a vital alternative to the reigning argument culture. Such spaces must be invented. The good news is that this invention is precisely what is happening on a variety of campuses.
This book is the product of a workgroup, convened by the Kettering Foundation, that involved faculty, administrators, and students who are experimenting with deliberation on their campuses. Meeting periodically between 1999 and 2005, participants in the workgroup tracked the major literature on civic engagement, taking a hard look at both opportunities and challenges, while simultaneously sharing stories, lessons, and outlines of successful practices from their own experiments with deliberative politics. Over time, as experiences, insights, and findings accumulated, the workgroup organizers came to believe that collecting some of the participants’ stories in one place could provide a stimulating and helpful resource for others interested in experimenting with deliberative democracy concepts and practices. The result is this collection of primarily narrative accounts of what has been tried and learned, presented in the spirit of longstanding American traditions of experimentation and innovation. The intent of this volume is not primarily to survey current pedagogical practices or to render a social scientific documentation of the effects of democratic practices on students. Rather, the narratives presented here illustrate possibilities for experimenting with deliberative practices across a range of curricular and institutional settings.
Among the contributors are faculty who teach graduate and undergraduate courses, university administrators, and a recent college graduate now pursuing her law degree. Their venues range from a major research university in Virginia to a liberal arts college in New England, from a state university in San Diego to a historically black university in Ohio. And their concerns encompass the critical experience of the first year in college, students’ efforts to address specific problems of the campus community, and the ongoing learning in and out of the classroom that is essential to the mission of higher education. In each instance, the authors experimented with deliberation in the context of specific issues that