Category: Teaching the Navigation of Difficult Dialogues
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“Democracy must be reborn in each generation and education is its midwife.” (John Dewey) How do we teach engaged citizenship and the kind of deliberative dialogue that can lead to wise public judgments? We can’t leave it to to schools, and we certainly can’t leave it to political parties who promote factionalism and hyper-partisanship. Each…
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As our text in the Public Policy class, I used a very good and recent book – Civic Fusion: Mediating Polarized Public Disputes by Susan Podziba. She defines “civic fusion” as occurring when “people bond, even as they sustain deep value differences, to solve a common public problem”. The book analyzes how this “civic fusion”…
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Among the questions asked by my students at the beginning of the semester were the following: “how can you explore the space between two extremes” and “how can you teach the polarized combatants that the best solution may not be as simple as “yes” or “no”?” They had had ample experience with, and wanted to…
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One objection often made to using a sequenced series of engagement steps is that it “takes time.” Although it does take some additional planning time and energy, separating and sequencing different types of dialogue can save considerable time and energy over the long run. Each of the dialogues in our three session sequence on gun…
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Our final class forum was more deliberative. Participants were given a student-created discussion guide, modeled after the National Issues Forum topic guides. This guide featured three “options” and asked the participants to consider the pros and cons, and tensions among each. Again, the forum invitation emphasized that all were welcome. It also reflected the universal…