Civic Education: Civic Deliberations: Learning to Talk and Work With Strangers
| Publication year | 2005 |
| Citation | Vol. 2005 No. 12 |
December 2005 - #2. CIVIC EDUCATION: Civic Deliberations: Learning to Talk and Work with Strangers
I had an experience as a high school student that has shaped my whole life. When an African American family attempted to move into my neighborhood, there was a riot and there was no safe place outside of my home to talk about it - not in my community, my church, or my school. Everyone was too afraid or too angry.
We have come a long way in fifty years - but public talk about controversial issues among and between our leaders and in the media is all too often pernicious. The larger public conversation sheds no light on situations - only more heat.
There is hope, however. Watching seven hundred high school students from the city, suburbs, and rural areas in Illinois - black, white, Hispanic, Asian, from all walks of life - give a 90+ African American federal judge a standing ovation gave me a lot of hope. They had spent the morning deliberating the legacy of Brown v Board of Education. The judge told how, as young attorney in Chicago in the early fifties, he advised the African American family who attempted to move into my neighborhood that what they were about to do was legal. As a result, he was indicted for inciting a riot and could have lost his license. Thurgood Marshall came to town to defend him. The students did not agree on the answers, but they all did agree that we still had a problem that needed fixing, and they were all committed to fixing it!
Deliberation is the very heart of a democratic system. Increasingly, our nation is becoming more polarized, not seeing others as fellow citizens fighting for the common good but as adversaries in a ceaseless contest for power. Civic deliberation - weighing opposing views, deciding difficult issues, accepting majority decisions while honoring dissent - is not natural behavior. It needs to be taught.
It is not being taught widely. Large-scale research on what actually happens in U.S. high school social studies and language arts courses shows that discussion is rare in the vast majority of classes. Researchers found that teachers typically equate some form of recitation with discussion, noted that more than 90 percent of their observations involved no discussion and, if there was discussion, it was brief.(fn1)
What was it they did not see? Here are some descriptions from the literature on deliberation:
* The question under discussion would have no obvious answer - nothing that could be looked up in their textbook.
* Everyone would have an equal opportunity to speak and would use that opportunity. * Everyone would use relevant background knowledge, including life-experiences, in a logical way.
* A variety of opinions would expressed, heard, respected, understood, and analyzed.
* Everyone would be engaged intellectually and emotionally.
* Everyone would be able to reach a reasoned decision that might or might not agree with others.
I would imagine not many of us have either conducted, or participated in, classrooms where this sort of deliberation happens much. There are all sorts of challenges to creating a classroom that deliberates. But when it is taught (and learned), it can also enhance academic knowledge and build civic skills. In 2001, an International Association for the Evaluation of Education Achievement (IEA) study of ninety thousand students in...
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