My commute to the University of Maryland
takes me about an hour and fifteen minutes each way (I live in Washington
and take the Metro to work). Therefore, I like to cluster my downtown
meetings on the same days, rather than shuttle back and forth between
DC and Maryland. Today—the coldest day so far this winter—I
had a string of meetings neatly arrayed across downtown. The first was
a breakfast with my good friends from the Study
Circles Resource Center. They support thousands of local "study
circles" around the county—groups of citizens who meet face-to-face
to discuss issues. We ate in an Irish-themed hotel restaurant near Dupont
Circle and talked about ways to promote a national deliberation for young
people on the topic of young Americans’ role in public life. As a researcher,
I am interested in what would happen if several organizations that promote
deliberation in very different ways all conducted a deliberation on the
same topic at the same time. For example, there are online deliberation
sites like E-ThePeople; grassroots
networks of citizens involved in face-to-face discussion like the National
Issues Forums; groups that convene randomly selected bodies of citizens
for intensive, lengthy conversations; and groups that manage very large
summit meetings of citizens all convened together in a single place. I
am interested in the differences among these methodologies. However, as
a result of the discussion with Study Circles, I realized that the important
differences are not really in methods. There probably isn’t even a huge
difference between online and face-to-face conversations. The important
distinction is the way that these groups fit into a larger social context:
how they recruit people, who participates, and what outcomes potentially
result from the deliberation.
Next stop was a meeting with United
Leaders, a Massachusetts-based group that has a Washington outpost
in a major law firm. So I found myself sitting in the lobby of an elegant
office building, decorated with scupltures that looked like Henry Moore’s.
(They weren’t.) The flagship program of United Leaders is a summer internship
for young people, and they wanted me to help them get some support from
the University of Maryland. I’m going to do my best.
Then on to the Council for Excellence
in Government, a major nonprofit, where my colleague Deborah has an
office. I wanted to camp out there for a little while, get Internet access
so that I could catch up with the latest developments with The Civic Mission
of Schools, and talk to Deborah.
At 3, my colleages Margaret and Carrie and I met with Dorothy Gilliam,
a distinguished Washington Post reporter who now manages the Post‘s
in journalism education. Our goal was to acquaint Ms. Gilliam and
her colleagues with our work with high school students in Prince George’s
County—work that involves a lot of journalistic skills (from interviewing
citizens to interpreting news articles). We were not well prepared and
did not have a good answer when we were asked what we wanted from the
Post. I blurted out that we were simply hungry for guidance from
people who had more experience than we do in journalism education. I don’t
know how we came across, but I did enjoy the conversation about young
people of color and their relationship to news and newspapers.
Margaret and Carrie and I then had a quick coffee near my house to debrief,
and that ended my work day.