{"id":19902,"date":"2018-04-30T09:22:23","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T13:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=19902"},"modified":"2018-04-30T09:22:23","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T13:22:23","slug":"deliberation-or-simulated-deliberation-choices-for-the-classroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=19902","title":{"rendered":"deliberation or simulated deliberation? choices for the classroom"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an article published today (“Deliberation or Simulated Deliberation?”<\/a>\u00a0in Democracy and Education<\/em>, 26, 1, Article 7), I respond to a valuable previous piece by\u00a0Margaret S. Crocco and her colleagues, “Deliberating Public Policy Issues with Adolescents: Classroom Dynamics and Sociocultural Considerations<\/a>.” These authors analyze classroom “deliberations” of current events and find disappointing results. Their analysis is rigorous and insightful. One finding particularly caught my eye.<\/p>\n

It is interesting that even students at the school with a large\u00a0immigrant population tended to talk about immigrants as \u201cthey\u201d\u00a0when they deliberated about national policy. They were essentially\u00a0role-playing the government or perhaps a body of influential\u00a0citizens of the United States. As Crocco and her colleagues write,\u00a0\u201cParticipating in the public debate about immigration in U.S.\u00a0classrooms positions one as an insider with all the privileges of\u00a0excluding outsiders that result from this status\u201d (Crocco et al., 2018). This is evidence that the students experienced the discussion\u00a0as a kind of role-play.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That finding leads me to propose that discussions can vary on two dimensions. Talking can result in an actual decision, or it can be about a simulated or hypothetical decision. And the participants can either speak for themselves or role-play characters. Those distinctions produce four types, all of which can be found in actual classrooms (and in settings for adults, such as community fora.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I think Crocco et al. provide some grounds for skepticism about simulated decision-making discussions in which the speakers represent themselves (cell 3). When we ask students (or adults) to discuss what “we” should do, where the “we” is actually a vast or distant entity, such as the US government, we position them as insiders even though they know they are outsiders. This disjunction could be fun or interesting, but I think often it just alienates.<\/p>\n

The other cells are more promising. It’s better to be able to: (1) govern a real entity, such as a student-led association, (2) give advice to a real decision-maker, or (4) pretend that you hold a decision-making role, such as a Senator in a fictional Congress.<\/p>\n

There are benign reasons to turn national issues into topics for small-group discussions. The goal is to make students (or others) feel that the government is theirs. It does<\/i> belong to them, as a matter of justice, and it’s great if they take away that feeling. But we must be serious about their limited power, or they will perceive the discussion as fake and perhaps draw the conclusion that democracy is fundamentally a false promise. As I write in the article:<\/p>\n

The students in these three classes did not actually decide\u00a0about immigration. At most, they might shift their individual\u00a0opinions on that topic, and if they encouraged others outside the\u00a0class to change their opinions in similar ways, that could possibly\u00a0affect national policy by influencing those people\u2019s votes. But that is\u00a0a remote form of impact for any citizen to consider, and especially\u00a0for students who are not old enough to vote themselves. The United\u00a0States is an \u201cImagined Community\u201d (Anderson, 1991), not a group of people who literally make decisions. The real group\u2014a classroom\u00a0full of students\u2014was pretending to deliberate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That is how I would explain why the results were disappointing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an article published today (“Deliberation or Simulated Deliberation?”\u00a0in Democracy and Education, 26, 1, Article 7), I respond to a valuable previous piece by\u00a0Margaret S. Crocco and her colleagues, “Deliberating Public Policy Issues with Adolescents: Classroom Dynamics and Sociocultural Considerations.” These authors analyze classroom “deliberations” of current events and find disappointing results. Their analysis is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advocating-civic-education","category-deliberation","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19902"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19905,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19902\/revisions\/19905"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}