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Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community:
Connecting Deliberative Dialogue, Community
Engagement, and Democratic Education
Nicholas V. Longo
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Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community: Connecting Deliberative
Dialogue, Community Engagement, and Democratic Education
Abstract
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Keywords
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Acknowledgements
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The best ways of educating people is to give them an experience that embodies
what you are trying to teach. When you believe in a democratic society, you
provide a setting for education that is democratic.
—Myles Horton, 1998, p. 68
Public deliberation is not new. This process for coming to public judgment about
difficult issues has been “part of the ongoing development of democracy” (Leighninger,
2012, p. 19) and has been for many centuries at the core of what makes communities
work (London 2010; Mathews, 1999; Nabatchi et al., 2012). Public deliberation was
used from the time of the ancient Greeks as a basis for democratic decision-making and
more recently in American history in the labor, women’s, and civil rights movements,
along with settlement houses, social centers, citizenship schools, and countless other
civic engagement projects across the globe (Barker et al., 2012; Cooper, 2008;
Leighninger, 2012; Longo, 2007).
In higher education, public deliberation spans many domains—connecting
communication studies with civic learning, and combining new approaches for teaching
and learning with multicultural education. As the field of public deliberation has grown
over the past decade, much research has been done to study the historical and
philosophical foundations for deliberative democracy, “what works” in practice, and how
public deliberation supports the civic mission of higher education (Dedrick et al., 2008;
Gastil and Levine, 2005; Harriger and McMillan, 2007; Nabatchi et al., 2012; Thomas
and Carcasson, 2010).
Public deliberation complements more widespread publicly-engaged
pedagogies—such as service-learning and community engagement—which are helping to
educate for civic responsibility through reciprocal partnerships that take place outside the
campus walls. According to the Higher Education Research Institute, 65% of college
freshmen report that their universities offer opportunities for community service or
community service-learning. This is not surprising, given the infrastructure on campuses
to support community-based learning. There are centers of service-learning and civic
engagement at up to 94% of colleges and universities that are members of Campus
Compact, a national consortium to support the civic mission of higher education, along
with majors, minors, and a new career track for directors of community engagement in
higher education (Butin and Seider, 2012; Campus Compact, 2008).
But these civic engagement practices—public deliberation and service-
learning/community engagement—too often take place in isolation. Publicly-engaged
pedagogies often simply mirror the silo mentality that permeates academia. There are
separate conferences, academic journals, funding streams, and offices to promote these
complementary approaches. However, many programs and practices are breaking new
ground in bridging pedagogical divides by being more intentional about connecting
deliberative dialogue with education in the community. This more integrated approach is
what I am calling “deliberative pedagogy in the community.”
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Longo: Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community
Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community: What is it?
The efficacy of public deliberation at resolving complex issues has led to its
elements being incorporated into domains beyond the public policy or political sphere.
One of the most prominent of these areas is education, specifically, deliberation as an
integral part of pedagogy. The difference between deliberative politics and deliberative
pedagogy is that the former integrates deliberative decision-making with public action
(Mathews, 2012), and the latter integrates deliberative decision-making with teaching and
learning.
Deliberative pedagogy in the community is a collaborative approach that melds
deliberative dialogue, community engagement, and democratic education. While
different, the approach is not entirely new. It draws upon the historical efforts of the
Highlander Folk School during the civil rights movement that was led by pioneering
educators such as Myles Horton, Septima Clark, and Bernice Robinson. Much has been
written about the Highlander tradition that connects education with social change (see for
instance, Adams, 1975 and Glen, 1996), but there has been little research on how the
processes used at Highlander can inform the practices of deliberative pedagogy.
This is especially timely as a growing number of projects are involving college
students in deliberative conversations outside what can sometimes be “the bubble” of the
college campus. Specifically, students are stepping outside the classroom and connecting
theory with real-world community problem-solving through intergenerational “learning
circles” with new immigrants, forums with community members on public issues, and
multiyear civic engagement courses. Faculty and students are co-creating shared spaces
for dialogue and collaborative action in the community and rethinking long-held power
dynamics between the campus and the community. This effort—and others like it—is
not without its challenges; however they have the potential to shift our basic
understanding of the role of higher education in society.
Deliberative pedagogy holds enormous promise in promoting the civic mission
of higher education through more collaborative approaches to teaching and learning that
respond to important and rapidly shifting contextual trends: increasing diversity, new
technologies that promote transparency and collaboration, and ardent desire of young
people to “make a difference” through concrete social action. It moves the academy
from the more traditional “teaching-to-learning” dynamic toward a model of
“collaborative engagement” in which knowledge is more genuinely co-created through
reflective public action. This shift toward collaboration also helps illuminate the civic
dimensions of teaching and learning that increasing numbers of students are demanding
and for which the communities in which higher education institutions are located—most
of which are struggling with complex problems—are asking.
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Deliberative Dialogue, Community Engagement, and Democratic Education
My first introduction to deliberative pedagogy came as an undergraduate student
in the mid-1990s. As part of a course on diversity, my classmates and I participated in a
deliberative forum on affirmative action with inner-city high school students at a public
school in the local neighborhood. The dialogue with a diverse group of young people
made me think more clearly about the policy choices that can be taken to overcome the
pervasive racial injustice in American society; it also helped me see the power of a
different kind of politics to address contentious issues like affirmative action and racism.
This course also included a service-learning requirement, so these deliberative
conversations were grounded in real-world experiences. I was working with the
principal, teachers, and students to start an afterschool program at a local middle school,
seeing firsthand the inequities in education in urban schools, especially along the lines of
race. But I was also learning how reciprocal partnerships could contribute to alleviating
these challenges—even if only in a small way. This helped me see how a different kind of
engagement could tap new resources for education reform.
I was also introduced to a different style of teaching and learning—sometimes
called “popular” or “democratic” education—that involved students as active participants
in their own education. I found inspiration in the idea that education could “free the
powers” of learners, as Jane Addams (1902/2002) described, and how this tradition of
education was integral to past social change efforts such as the labor and civil rights
movements through the Highlander Folk School. This helped me see that education could
be a liberating experience and how a different kind of learning could lead to action.
I now realize from my introduction to a different kind of politics, model of
engagement, and style of education that these serve as the foundation for community-
based deliberative pedagogy or what I am now calling “deliberative pedagogy in the
community.” Deliberative pedagogy in the community brings three overlapping ways of
teaching and learning together: deliberative dialogue, community engagement, and
democratic education (see Figure One).
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Longo: Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community
Figure One: Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community
Talking Outside the Classroom
Throughout our nation’s history, education has been linked to the promise of
democracy. Public d
eliberation
classrooms
of all types, from kindergarten to higher education. For instance, a teacher
might use public deliberation to help students understand the nature of public po
choices
, to develop skills at group co
such as immigration
, the federal debt,
deliberation tend to be
important examples
teaching and learning.
Yet too often
over the past century
education has
been confined to the classroom
theoretical exercise, and tends to value civic knowledge and attitudes above mor
oriented civic values,
such as civic practices and
as it o
verlooks the many assets of
“The American tendency to equate education and schooling and make schools the
instrument for satisfying our wants and alleviating our malaise takes attention from our
circumsta
nces,” writes John Goodlad
contextual circumstances unaddressed”
Schooling and communities
each must be addressed by harnessing the many talents in the entire “ecology of
education” (Cremin, 1976).
Thus, community centers, places of worship, libraries, local
Figure One: Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community
Talking Outside the Classroom
Throughout our nation’s history, education has been linked to the promise of
eliberation
is often used as a vehicle to
make this connection
of all types, from kindergarten to higher education. For instance, a teacher
might use public deliberation to help students understand the nature of public po
, to develop skills at group co
mmunication, or to understand
specific
, the federal debt,
or educational reform. These
approaches
important examples
not only of civic learning, but also
over the past century
, the connection between democr
acy and
been confined to the classroom
. This makes
civic learning a more
theoretical exercise, and tends to value civic knowledge and attitudes above mor
such as civic practices and
public skills. It is also
too constricting
verlooks the many assets of
neighborhood and community institutions
“The American tendency to equate education and schooling and make schools the
instrument for satisfying our wants and alleviating our malaise takes attention from our
nces,” writes John Goodlad
(1997). “We
beat on schools, leaving the
contextual circumstances unaddressed”
(p. 41).
Schooling and communities
are inextricably
linked: solutions to the problems in
each must be addressed by harnessing the many talents in the entire “ecology of
Thus, community centers, places of worship, libraries, local
Throughout our nation’s history, education has been linked to the promise of
make this connection
in
of all types, from kindergarten to higher education. For instance, a teacher
might use public deliberation to help students understand the nature of public po
licy
specific
public issues
approaches
to public
not only of civic learning, but also
of engaged
acy and
civic learning a more
theoretical exercise, and tends to value civic knowledge and attitudes above mor
e action-
too constricting
for learning.
“The American tendency to equate education and schooling and make schools the
instrument for satisfying our wants and alleviating our malaise takes attention from our
beat on schools, leaving the
linked: solutions to the problems in
each must be addressed by harnessing the many talents in the entire “ecology of
Thus, community centers, places of worship, libraries, local
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businesses, coffee shops, and the networks of other community institutions should be
seen as part of the learning ecosystem.
A growing number of educators are recognizing the power of the community for
civic learning, drawing upon the educational philosophies of Jane Addams, John Dewey,
Elsie Clapp, Myles Horton, Lawrence Cremin, and others (Longo, 2007). These
educators have found that thinking more broadly about where and how learning takes
place is equally as important as what is learned. It also unleashes a vast set of resources
for learning and allows education to be more connected to democratic revitalization.
Education in the community is active learning that takes place outside of, but
often connected with, the classroom. It involves more than a short-term community
service project; it means intentionally putting education in the context of long-term
community-building efforts. It is most often place-based, using a collaborative,
integrated, problem-solving approach (Smith, 1992; Stein, 2001).
The role of community more often gets recognized as part of student internships,
practicums, international immersion, and especially service-learning courses in higher
education. There is also a strand of education in the community that includes public
deliberation. Thus, deliberative pedagogy is being used in a growing number of courses
and programs (described below), where students are involved in public deliberation in
community-based settings that go well beyond my introduction to deliberation as an
undergraduate.
Today, students are involved in a variety of deliberative projects that ask them to
take leadership in their local communities. Students lead dialogues about complex issues
with campus and community stakeholders and reflection sessions for service-learning
courses. Students are involved in efforts to magnify the voices of young people on public
issues and capture the stories of the elders in a community. They use not only forums,
but also photography, dance, film, poetry, and other forms of art to facilitate community
deliberations.
Deliberative pedagogy in the community connects—and transforms—deliberative
dialogue, community engagement, and democratic education by attempting to create
space for reciprocal conversations that are grounded in real-world experiences. Harry
Boyte notes how reflective practice emerges from including deliberative aspects in public
work. “When collective labor becomes public work with deliberative dimensions, both
labor and deliberation take on new powers,” explains Boyte, one of the leading thinkers
arguing for civic renewal in higher education. “Deliberative public work creates
reflective learning cultures in which citizens come to understand the value of different
views and in which they revisit the significance of what they create” (p. 11). Boyte also
notes the significant shift that happens when citizens, as opposed to experts, are “at the
center” of decision-making.
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Longo: Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community
Deliberative Pedagogy and Highlander Folk School
The Highlander Folk School in the mountains of Tennessee provides perhaps the
most prescient historical example of this kind of “citizen-centered” approach, with
deliberative pedagogy outside the boundaries of the traditional classroom. Highlander
Folk School was co-founded in 1932 by Myles Horton, an educator who was looking for
a way to put his hopes for social justice through democratic education into practice.
Inspired by community-based educational models such as the Danish Folk Schools, along
with conversations with leaders such as Jane Addams, Highlander became an educational
hub for the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s and the civil rights movement in the
1950s and 1960s; and Highlander (now named the Highlander Research and Education
Center) continues to practice deliberative pedagogy on a host of social issues ranging
from youth leadership and environmental sustainability, to immigrant rights and racial
justice.
The foundation of this deliberative pedagogy involves trusting in people. Horton
(1998) explains:
When Highlander workshops are described to people who haven’t
experienced them, it often sounds like we are always contradicting
ourselves, because we do things differently every time, according to what
is needed. We’ve changed methods and techniques over the years, but the
philosophy and conditions for learning stay the same. There is no method
to learn from Highlander. What we do involves trusting people and
believing in their ability to think for themselves. (p. 157)
Trusting in people meant investing time and energy in the individuals, groups, and
communities that Highlander worked with, and is part of the type of deliberative
pedagogy that has been described as a “circle of learners” (Horton, 1998, 1985/2003). “I
think of an educational workshop as a circle of learners,” Horton (1998) writes. ‘“Circle’
is not an accidental term, for there is no head of the table at Highlander workshops;
everybody sits around a circle” (p. 150). Out of this description, others have termed the
deliberative style of teaching and learning at Highlander “learning circles” (Wallace,
2011). Learning circles have subsequently been used by publicly-engaged faculty in a
variety of contexts, including through the creation of the Invisible College, a faculty-led
organization that convened at Highlander in the mid-1990s. The Invisible College helped
to launch a national conversation about the role of faculty in “social transformation
through the transformation of institutions of postsecondary education…using pedagogies
of community-based instruction” (Wallace, 1995).
While at one time Highlander considered initiating a community school for all
ages, infusing its educational philosophy into traditional education, that plan never
materialized. Rather, Highlander’s aim has been to work with people and communities
for social justice outside traditional educational institutions. Highlander tried to find
people with common concerns, invite them to talk through their problems in a safe
environment, and then support them in finding solutions through a democratic exchange
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of ideas. This is very different from most classrooms in higher education; learning did
not lead to a grade or credential, expertise was grounded in the stories and experiences of
all participants, and a great deal of time was dedicated to using narratives to create a
collective consciousness and then act.
Highlander workshops were based on “mining” the experiences that participants
brought with them to the workshop. The core ingredient for any learning circle is the
idea that experiences are co-created based on people’s stories. Conversation begins
where people are, and then grows out of these experiences. Horton wanted participatory,
active learners; not what Paulo Freire (1970/2000) calls passive learners, who are simply
asked to put information “into a bank” to be retrieved on command at a later date. With
this approach, small learning communities with deep relationships took precedence over
larger, more passive groups. For instance, Horton (n.d.) once tellingly wrote, “Twenty
learners will eventually reach more people and be more effective than two hundred
listeners.”
In a conversation with Freire, Horton describes how Highlander’s theory of
education involves more than people simply sitting in a circle, chatting, without any
direction—a critique often leveled at deliberative dialogue. Horton (Horton & Freire,
1990) responds by comparing democratic education to planting a garden:
Someone criticized Highlander workshops, saying, ‘All you do is sit there and
tell stories.’ Well, if he’d seen me in the spring planting my garden, he would’ve
said: ‘That guy doesn’t know how to grow vegetables. I don’t see any
vegetables.’… Well he was doing the same thing about observing the workshop.
It was the seeds getting ready to start, and he thought that was the whole process.
To me it’s essential that you start where people are. But if you’re going to start
where they are and they don’t change, then there’s no point in starting because
you’re not going anywhere…. But if you don’t have some vision of what ought
to be or what they can become, then you have no way of contributing anything to
the process. (pp. 99-100)
The seeds of Highlander’s educational method grew in dramatic ways.
Highlander’s most famous student, Rosa Parks, for example, attended a Highlander
workshop in the summer before the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Horton, 1966). Other
well-known successes include the development of the citizenship schools spearheaded
by local leaders such as Septima Clark, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins with
support from Highlander during the Civil Rights movement (Tjerandsen, 1980).
Among the significant contributions of Highlander are the decision-making
processes that are used. Learning circles empower people by democratizing decision-
making. And this, for Horton, was integrally tied to education. He argued that learning
and decision-making are inseparable. “People learn from making decisions,” Horton
(1973/2003) explains, “and making decisions helps them learn” (p. 245). Thus,
Highlander involved students in naming, framing, and ultimately, acting on the issues
that mattered most to them.
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Longo: Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community
Lamenting the hierarchical nature of decision-making in education, controlled by
a small group of experts with narrow specializations often in the name of efficiency,
Horton (1976/2003) states: “If we are to have a democratic society, people must find or
invent new channels through which decisions are made” (p. 252). Some of these
channels, as we shall see in the next section, are taking root through deliberative
pedagogy in higher education today.
Deliberative Pedagogy in Higher Education Today
While the democratic practices at Highlander during the social movements of the
past took place in very different settings from today’s colleges and universities, the
history of deliberative pedagogy in the community offers significant lessons for higher
education today. In contemporary higher education, many promising efforts are taking
place that infuse deliberative pedagogy into engaged learning, including in a growing
number of campus-community partnerships.
As mentioned above, learning circles were central to the creation of the Invisible
College, an organization for publicly-engaged faculty. This had an impact on faculty
members who then have brought the Highlander tradition into their teaching. A
participant in these learning circles at Highlander, David Cooper (2008) of Michigan
State University, for instance, writes that applying the sort of “democratic pedagogy
Horton has in mind” means: “first and foremost linking students’ academic learning with
experiences of democratic building and public work, learning that is rigorously situated
in lived contexts and grounded in action.” Cooper, a leader in the fields of deliberative
democracy and community engagement, then concludes with what this means for the
way he assesses his teaching: “I hardly ever ask, ‘how well am I teaching?’” Instead,
echoing the shift away from an instructional paradigm, he asks: “What am I learning?
and am I getting out of my students’ way?” (p. 126).
The practice of deliberative pedagogy in the community can likewise have a
profound impact on students, as seen in campus-community partnerships, such as the
Jane Addams School in St. Paul, Minnesota. Like Highlander, Jane Addams School
“teaches that democracy happens in real time and place” (Kari and Skelton, 2007, p. 14)
as the community-based school involves college students, young people, and immigrant
community members in ongoing deliberative conversations and joint public work
projects. This helps participants develop civic skills, such as genuinely listening in an
open-minded way and recognizing the wisdom of community voices. One college
student involved in Jane Addams School explains how the experiences taught her one
couldn’t get all the answers from “reading something in a book.” She reflects that “the
space at Jane Addams School asks you to consider what other people are saying—to
consider other voices, others’ knowledge…as legitimate sources” (Kari and Skelton,
2007, p. 30).
There are other examples of deliberative pedagogy in the community occurring
in higher education. These examples include programs that prepare students to lead
deliberative forums using “passionate impartiality” in community settings; multiyear
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efforts that allow cohorts of students to master the art of deliberative dialogue on
campus, while also participating in service-learning courses; and projects that help
students facilitate community visioning and planning. When these kinds of community-
based partnerships are done well, according to one researcher, they serve dual purposes,
allowing: 1) the community to come together for the first time to “actually hammer out a
set of concrete plans for the town’s future;” and 2) the college “to extend its reach in the
community and contribute resources and expertise in a uniquely collaborative and
participatory way” (London, 2010, p. 5).
An initial survey of some of these partnerships follows.
• Jane Addams School for Democracy, located in a neighborhood that has been
termed “the Ellis Island of the Midwest” on the West Side of St. Paul, involves
college students and faculty from local colleges working with new immigrants
and refugees in cross-cultural learning circles several times per week. Using the
mantra, “We are all teachers, we are all learners,” the project immerses university
students in reciprocal conversations which lead to joint public work. Projects
include language learning and citizenship test preparation, community gardening,
youth organizing to improve the schools, and interactive candidate forums (Kari
and Skelton, 2007; Longo, 2007).
• The Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University offers a year-
long course through the Department of Communications for undergraduate
students that enable them to learn the theory and practice of deliberative
democracy. The faculty, staff, and students from the Center pride themselves on
the “passionate impartiality” they bring to community issues, which Martin
Carcasson argues is an essential, but often neglected, aspect of democracy. The
students in the course—termed “Student Associates”—are involved in
moderating community forums in Colorado using National Issue Forums (NIF)
guide books on topics like school funding and child care. As facilitators in the
community, students can bring a passion for the process, without necessarily an
agenda for the results (Carcasson, 2010).
• Wake Forest University sponsored a four-year project with thirty undergraduate
Democracy Fellows learning about deliberative democracy by organizing and
moderating forums not only on campus, but also “on the road” in the local
community. As part of the project, the Democracy Fellows organized a
community deliberation in Winston-Salem on urban sprawl that involved a
number of community leaders in the process, including the mayor, an executive
of the Chamber of Commerce, and members of several neighborhood councils
(Harriger and McMillan, 2007). Democracy Fellows participated in a course,
Citizen and Community, where they examined public education using an NIF
issue guide on public schooling, along with a service-learning project partnering
with a local organization to facilitate a series of study circle dialogues on public
schooling (Crawford, 2008).
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Longo: Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community
• The New England Center for Civic Life involves students from Franklin Pierce
University using art and dialogue around a host of issues, including campus-wide
conversations on water-related environmental issues in Rindge, New Hampshire
(Doherty, 2010). In addition, the Center helped facilitate a community visioning
process about sustainable growth in Rindge that involved students in what they
termed “problem-based service learning” (London, 2010, p. 5).
• Hofstra University’s Center for Civic Engagement sponsored a program called
“Deepening Democracy through Deliberation” to generate community-wide
conversations on public issues leading up to the presidential election in 2012
(including the Presidential Debate hosted at Hofstra). The program organized
public forums facilitated by well-trained undergraduate students in schools and
public libraries on policy issues such as education and the United States’ role in
the world.
• At Michigan State University, several humanities courses, including a general
education writing requirement and a senior American Studies Capstone seminar,
infuse deliberative democracy into the curriculum. The curriculum, according to
David Cooper (2008), has the unique distinction of being “a pedagogy that cross
fertilizes active learning techniques, particularly service-learning, and
deliberative democracy practices, such as public forums, study circles, and civic
engagement opportunities for students” (p. 114).
Providence College Smith Hill Annex
Providence College’s Feinstein Institute for Public Service is also experimenting
with deliberative pedagogy in the community with the development of the PC/Smith Hill
Annex. The Annex, a 1,000 square-foot storefront leased by Providence College from the
Smith Hill Community Development Corporation, draws explicitly on the lessons of
Myles Horton and other historical democratic experiments such as Jane Addams’ Hull
House and the social settlement movement (Addams, 1910/1998; Longo, 2007).
Keith Morton of Providence College, who spearheaded the project, describes it as
“a space for community and campus to come together.” The Annex hosts courses open
to students and community members; potluck dinners and book clubs; breakdance,
exercise and street art programs; strategic planning meetings of partner organizations;
education and support groups for people contending with a variety of challenges—any
configuration that will bring campus and community into dialogue. The expectation is
that over time the co-creation of this shared space will facilitate campus and community
“getting to know one another as neighbors.” Morton concludes: “Our deep hope is that
these conversations will help the people and institutions articulate and realize what it is
that they find most meaningful” (Battistoni et al., Forthcoming).
As part of the Annex, the Department of Public and Community Service Studies
at Providence College is partnering with College Unbound, an experimental college for
non-traditional college students, and several local high schools and community-based
organizations to explore the theme “The City and…” An annual course on the topic,
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which includes college students, high school students, and community members meeting
weekly, provides space for intergenerational conversations and reflective practice around
the city of Providence. The first course in fall of 2011, The City and Its Youth, examined
the theme of youth and youthwork. The subsequent course, The City and Its Storytellers,
focused on capturing neighborhood-based storytelling in Providence. Future themes
being considered include The City and Its Arts, The City and the World, and the City and
Its Future.
Overcoming Challenges
These initiatives offer compelling examples of the potential link between
deliberation dialogue, community engagement, and democratic education; but there are
also challenges with asking college students to take real responsibility in the community.
Unlike Highlander, the above examples are located within the confines of university
education, which is built upon numerous artificial constructions of time. Students take
classes measured in credit hours, courses are offered in terms, schedules change each
semester until students amass enough hours at the university to graduate. These ways of
thinking about time grow out of a scientific conception of learning. John Tagg (2003)
suggests that common conceptions of time in higher education result in a limited “time
horizon.” That is, students and professors think they will have to live with the
consequences of their actions at school for only a brief time.
As one example of this limited time horizon, Herman Blake tells a story of trying
to see if some of his college students could intern at Highlander. Blake had been at
Highlander, knew Myles Horton, and was aware of Highlander’s work with communities.
Thinking this would be an ideal learning experience for his students, he asked Horton,
still director of Highlander, if students from Santa Cruz could come and do internships at
Highlander. “Yes,” Horton replied, “we will be glad to have them, provided that they stay
with us for two years” (quoted in Wallace, 2000, p. 133). This type of community
commitment does not fit into the current structure of higher education.
Harriger and McMillan (2007) address another aspect of the challenge of
students working in communities for limited amounts of time as they struggled with
student accountability in the Democracy Fellows program at Wake Forest. In their
study, Harriger and McMillan chronicle some of the “ethical dilemmas” they faced as
public scholars and teachers weighing the competing demands of educating their
students, while also being citizens and neighbors themselves in the community. “We
came face-to-face with what it means when the community itself becomes the learning
environment” (p. 113), they wrote in recognizing the different reward systems and time
horizons between the campus and the community.
Harriger and McMillan ultimately worked through these tensions. But the
faculty members were left with questions about whether they, as teachers and mentors,
should allow their students to fail, which might be a good learning experience—at the
expense of the community; or alternatively, whether they should “intervene with
expertise… to help ensure the most productive outcome for the community we all share”
(p. 112).
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Longo: Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community
Others have raised similar challenges about the role of student leadership in the
community. For instance, Richard Cone, an early pioneer in service-learning at the
University of Southern California, offers a challenge that empowering students in
campus-community partnerships means giving ownership of civic engagement efforts to
the most transient and least experienced of those involved in the partnerships. The
ethical dilemma that Cone shares is the uncertainty as to “how to engage students in a
way that they acquired a sense of humility and a respect for those they ‘serve.’” Cone
questions the privilege associated with many students in institutions of higher learning,
who he fears “would use their service experiences to acquire skills and knowledge they
could use to further disenfranchise those already disenfranchised” (p. 21). In giving
students more responsibility for leading deliberation in the community, do we run the
risk of increasing their sense of privilege and shifting control of the learning even further
away from the community?
These challenges can be overcome, however, by applying the heightened
expectations which come from what Richard Battistoni has termed a “sustained,
development, cohort” curriculum that prepares and supports students to be engaged
democratic citizens in community settings. Battistoni and his colleagues (Mitchel et al.,
2011) describe the impact of multiyear programs such as the Public and Community
Service Studies major at Providence College, the Citizen Scholar Program at the
University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the Public Service Scholars Program at
Stanford University—all programs which have existed since the mid-1990s—on the
formation of civic identities and effective campus–community partnerships. These
programs each contain several fundamental principles that help produce students with an
enhanced civic identity and the skills necessary for relational, action-oriented leadership:
student voice, community collaboration, engaged scholarship, and a commitment to
reflective practice. Furthermore, when community partnerships are long-term,
reciprocal relationships, space is opened for experimentation, mistakes, and flexibility as
both sides of the partnership see themselves as dedicated to the long haul.
Deliberative pedagogy in the community also seems to offer an opportunity to
address other criticisms leveled against deliberative dialogue and community
engagement, respectively. For instance, one criticism of deliberative dialogue is a
version of the old adage “all talk, no action”—or as Myles Horton explained how some
thought that at Highlander: “All you do is sit there and tell stories.” In advocating for
the importance of including public work in deliberative dialogue, Harry Boyte (1995)
explains:
Deliberative democracy, welcome as it is, is not enough. Alone, it all too
easily takes on a hortatory, idealized quality that separates out an abstract
"public sphere" of communicative consensus from real world politics built
upon negotiation, bargaining, messy compromise and also creative work
to what was once termed, in American history, the commonwealth. (The
Public Sphere, para. 33)
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Similarly, critics point to the seemingly apolitical nature of community
engagement. This can be seen in the language and framework of service-learning, the
most common form of community engagement, with its emphasis on “serving needs” and
addressing community “deficiencies” (McKnight 1995).
Many forms of community
engagement also fail to recognize the nature of politics and power. Boyte (2004) contends
that service routinely “neglects to teach about root causes and power relationships, fails
to stress productive impact, ignores politics, and downplays the strengths and talents of
those being served” (p. 12).
Deliberative pedagogy in the community opens opportunities for public
deliberation to recognize the political aspects of community engagement; for community
engagement to incorporate collective action into public deliberation; and for democratic
education to foster empowerment and reciprocity into teaching and learning.
Conclusion: Toward Collaborative Engagement
“Deliberative democracy challenges academic institutions at every level: from the
nature of teaching and the character of the extracurricular program to the very meaning of
scholarship,” writes David Mathews (2009, p. 13), president of the Kettering Foundation
and a former U.S. cabinet secretary responsible for overseeing education policy. And
when rooted in the community, deliberative pedagogy also offers higher education an
example of the type of civic innovation needed for colleges and universities to respond to
the complex challenges facing society.
Deliberative pedagogy in the community challenges our ideas about politics,
engagement, and education by building on the historical lessons from the Highlander
Folk School and several promising practices on campuses today. This framework also
seems to offer insight into what the next paradigm of teaching and learning is likely to
look like.
Almost twenty years ago, Barr and Tagg (1995) articulated an important conceptual
shift in teaching and learning—from an instructional to a learning paradigm—that is
taking place across the landscape of higher education. This shift moves a college from an
institution that exists to provide instruction, to an institution that exists to provide
learning. With the learning-centered approach, they write, the college’s purpose serves
“not to transfer knowledge but to create environments and experiences that bring students
to discover and construct knowledge for themselves, to make students members of
communities of learning that make discoveries and solve problems” (p. 15). And yet, as
the case of Highlander and a growing number of campus programs make clear, when
deliberative pedagogy takes place outside the classroom, it recognizes the importance of
the community for civic learning.
The examples of deliberative pedagogy in the community seem to go beyond a
simple teacher–learner dichotomy by fully incorporating the ecology of educational
opportunities available to students. Building on these insights, the Next Generation
Engagement Project sponsored by New England Resource Center for Higher Education
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Longo: Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community
has begun to argue that deliberative, reciprocal, co-creative engagement is the foundation
for a new framework for teaching and learning, what might be termed “collaborative
engagement.”
The emergence of this new collaborative paradigm is partly the result of significant
cultural transformations, especially the advent and adaptation of innovative technologies
that have revolutionized the ways in which people communicate, work, and learn. This
idea, however, also echoes ideas from educational figures, such as John Dewey (1910),
who believed that knowledge and learning are most effective when people work
collaboratively to solve specific, real world problems. “Thinking,” he wrote, “begins
in…a forked road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma,
which poses alternatives” (p.11). But to really be immersed in these kinds of forked-road
situations most often requires going outside the boundaries of the classroom and
involving the community as reciprocal partners and co-educators.
Figure Two: Approaches to Teaching and Learning
Educational
Paradigm
Instructional Learning Collaborative
Engagement
Mission and
Purpose
Provide
Instruction
Produce Learning Co-Create
Knowledge
Configuration of
Learning
Teacher to Student
Teacher with Student Ecology of
Education
Teaching/Learning
Structures
Independent
Disciplines
Interdisciplinary
Learning
Multidisciplinary
Problem-Solving
Faculty Roles
Lectures Designs Learning
Methods
Facilitates Creative
Learning Process
Student Roles
Passive Recipients
Active Learners Co-Producers
Community Roles
None Limited to Site for
Learning
Reciprocal Partners
Building on Dewey’s belief in the connections between learning and community
problem-solving, we have witnessed democratic experiments in teaching and learning
such as the learning circles utilized by Highlander Folk School. This model is also
emerging in higher education in what I have termed “deliberative pedagogy in the
community.” These shifts mean not only recognizing new places for learning, but also
recognizing the need for new connections. Thus, in order to fully develop and implement
a new paradigm for teaching and learning, we need to be, well, even more collaborative.
This is a call for us to practice collaborative engagement by breaking the disciplining
silos that engulf even reform movements in higher education, a call for connecting
academic learning with community engagement, democratic education, and deliberative
dialogue. In short, we need to do more talking—and engaging collaboratively—in the
community.
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