Learning Exchanges
Community Voice: An Essential Element of Service Learning and Community Partnership
Elizabeth Hudson and Deirdra Stockmann, University of Michigan
Chris Glass, Michigan State University
Despite the myriad connections universities have made with communities through student service learning, community-based scholarship, and new administrative units, navigating a university system can be daunting for community members looking to communicate their needs. Though much has been written about improving community partnership, few studies privilege community articulations of need. This presentation shares community perspectives on the expected roles for campus partners when they meet to organize, implement, and sustain social action with communities. Presenters explore five community-voiced themes from an interview analysis of community partners involved in a program assessment. This deepened awareness will help students explore how they can contribute to the creation of mutual partnerships. Participants will leave understanding how to include community voices in their approach to working with communities and through better formulation of roles and expectations.
Will you go out to dinner with me? A workshop on broadening student engagement in issues of diversity
Elise Selinger and Becca Schouvieller
Bowdoin College
“Freedom is…the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them-and then, the opportunity to choose.”- C. Wright Mills The Sociological Imagination
In this Learning Exchange, student leaders of Bowdoin College’s “The Undiscussed” will ask participants to consider the ways that a myriad number of identity markers shape the typical ‘dinner date’. At Bowdoin we have found that enriching discussions on race and class with other identity markers (gender, sexual orientation, dietary restrictions, religion, nationality, language, body image, able-bodied, among others) increases the number of students willing to engage in issues diversity. The workshop will guide participants through the experience of a ‘dinner date’. Participants will discover that multiple identity markers inform the choices that each individual makes throughout the evening. Often what appears to be a choice for many is not a choice for all. By learning from one another’s experiences we learn that the choices we make everyday expand or limit opportunities for ourselves and for others.
Interactive Theatre Forum
Gulson Casuvoglu, Evan Russell, and Michele Holt-Shannon
University of New Hampshire
WildActs Social Change Theatre Troupe works to raise awareness of social issues in an artistic and entertaining way. The troupe recognizes the power of theatre and music, not only to entertain, but to inspire and touch lives. In this workshop everyone is an actor! We will explore openly, honestly, and frequently with humor the issues we deal with as students finding our voice as engaged citizens. Come learn new techniques you can use to build community, educate, explore tough issues or just have fun. Expect to be surprised, but not shocked. Expect to be informed, but not lectured at. Expect to laugh. Expect to cry. Expect to see yourself.
School Board 2.0: A Case Study of E-Democracy and Youth Engagement
Nick Troiano
Pike County Youth Coalition
School Board 2.0 is a online platform that seeks to increase community deliberation, citizen engagement, and government transparency on a hyper-local level. The project utilizes free Internet technologies to bring school board meetings online to the public, where citizens can view and participate in decision-making. It is currently being piloted in Pike County, Pennsylvania and offers a case study (in progress) of how technology can be used to improve democracy. The Pike County Youth Coalition, a youth-led non-profit organization, launched the project in July, 2009 with a Democracy 2.0 grant. It can be accessed at www.DVSBonline.com.
Zombies, Machines, the Cloud and Us
Angela Doucet Rand
University of South AL, Baldwin County Campus
USA Baldwin County Branch Campus has, over the course of a year, developed a vigorous and thriving social media campaign. Penetration of social networking media into student populations is growing. Entering the social media hive is fraught with perils and potholes. Social media has opened doors and enabled individuals and groups to interact on a level that has been previously unheard of. Connecting online has many benefits but there are also invisible risks to joining the online tribe. Students need to consider some very basic yet vital ideas about social media applications and the implications for continued reciprocal conversations. Today’s entry level users of social media are the unwary creators of tomorrow’s World Wide Web.
The transparency afforded by the ease of online communities opens doors and gives new members confidence to join in discussions and become a part of a group. Social media users need to be aware of an insidious trend toward anonymity in social media that can work to squelch interaction and freedom of thought. Online anonymity can be a boon for the shy and reticent speaker but it also gives courage to what has been called hive mind. The ethics of creating and using social media that encourages continual democratic discourse will be a focus of this learning exchange.
The Deliberative Process with Undergraduate Volunteer Groups
Anna Lloyd and Brittney Jones, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Lauree Blair, Miles College
Brittney Jones, Anna Lloyd, and Lauree Blair are conducting and filming forums with University of Alabama at Birmingham and Miles College student groups in February 2010. The student groups began meeting in Fall 2009 to discuss and act on issues of poverty and education. The groups expressed the need to contribute more meaningful service to these issues than traditional volunteering offered. In addition they desired to make sustained connections with community members. This February the groups will go through National Issues Forums issue books related to their topics. The film being produced from these forums will document the process and involve personal accounts from the students about their experience in the forums and whether or not they feel the process helped them make more informed decisions together and ultimately more meaningful changes in their community.
Center for Public Deliberation: Building student capacity for deliberative practice through passionate impartiality
Leah Sprain, Jack Becker, Darrie Burrage, Chelsea Suchomel, Daniel Weiner
Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation
The Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation (CPD) is dedicated to enhancing local democracy through improved public communication and community problem solving. Over time, we’ve discovered that “passionate impartiality” is fundamental to meeting this goal. We are impartial about community problems, but passionate about our vision of local democracy that brings people together across differences to solve problems more collaboratively. As impartial analysts, conveners, and facilitators, we are able to bring people together to have conversations not typically found in our adversarial political culture. This learning exchange will briefly present what we mean by “passionate impartiality,” the cycle of deliberative inquiry, and how the CPD serves as a model of how to involve students in improving public communication. The majority of time will be spend in small groups working through examples of what passionate impartiality means at each stage of the deliberative cycle: deliberative policy analysis, convening, facilitating deliberative practice, and reporting. CPD students will work with each of the groups as facilitators who can help model passionate impartiality.
The Movement of Improvement: A Deliberative Model for Higher Education
Behnam Bakhtiary, Jack Becker, Darrie Burrage, Nate Fiedler, Chelsea Suchomel, Daniel Weiner
Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation
The session will be dedicated to deliberation and how it can contribute to the challenge of improving higher education. Student Associates from Colorado State University’s Center for Public Deliberation (CPD) will conduct the session. It will be comprised of a brief presentation on our organization’s overarching endeavors to incorporate deliberation into higher education, and a learning exchange activity that will model a brainstorming process. The activity will give participants an idea of the conversation that has taken place at our university and show them a unique approach to deliberation that has been found to be valuable for evaluating ideas. This activity “connects the dots” of change within an institution, with deliberation as a tool for transitioning between steps: brainstorming ideas for change, evaluating those ideas, and implementing them.
Lenses and Letters: How Teens View Civic Participation
Mark Wilson et al.
Auburn University
For the past several months, David Mathews Center for Civic Life interns in Auburn University’s College of Liberal Arts have worked with teenagers in local communities around the state to help discover and document what they believe lies behind the civic crisis in the United States. After either an introduction to the project or participation in the National Issues Forum on Democracy’s Challenge, the topic of the Mathews Center 2009-10 Alabama Issues Forums, teens were given a disposable camera and the challenge to reveal why they think citizens are not more active regarding the issues that concern them. Interns will report the results of the project and discuss what they have learned about democratic participation throughout the process.
Engaging Latino Populations in Social Services
Joe Parmer
Thomas B. Norton Public Library
The poster and presentation of Engaging Latino Communities in Social Services will begin with some general information about the topic and highlight the work of the Thomas B. Norton Public Library’s Latino Outreach Initiative. The presentation will touch on the community demographics which are directly involved with that project as well as an overview of the initiative’s mission to encourage the growing local Latino community take advantage of the library’s resources as well as bring together the area’s Latino and non-Latino communities in a neutral space. The presentation will continue by describing some of the preliminary research that was done on similar projects in nearby communities as well as around the country. This research will illustrated the extreme importance of bringing in the target community to play an active role the development of the library’s services and collection to successfully meet their unique needs as well as garner a strong connection with the library as an institution. From there the presentation will focus on the activities of the project which have already been accomplished over the past year and a half for the purpose of this goal and their outcomes. These activities range in scope from focus groups to community outreach events in both the Latino and non-Latino communities. Time will be taken to give an analysis of the successes and shortcomings of these activities in accomplishing the project’s mission as a lead-in to the interactive learning exchange. While the purpose of the initiative itself is for the sake of the Thomas B. Norton Public Library and its general functions the presentation and learning exchange will exclusively focus on the methodology of the library’s cooperative interaction with the local Latino community. The goal in participation with this learning exchange will be to analyze and critique previous activities while brainstorming and developing new strategies to be used in similar projects as well as the continuation of the library’s Latino outreach.
Teaching History and Citizenship: Implementing Deliberative Practices in a Middle School Classroom
Cristin Foster, University of Montevallo
Angel King, University of Alabama
Middle school classrooms serve as unique communities in which to implement the practices of deliberative democracy and decision making. Teaching the practices of deliberative democracy in a classroom provides students with an opportunity to learn decision making skills that will enable them to be effective and engaged citizens in every community they participate in as they mature, including school, town, state, and nation. Several methods and resources exist, such as NIF in the Classroom published by the National Issues Forums Institute and “Slavery or ‘Freedom Forever’: What’s at Stake in the Kansas-Nebraska Act?,” produced by The New England Center for Civic Life and Dr. Douglas Ley, that aid teachers in implementing deliberative decision making practices. The presenters are currently using these resources to integrate the practices of deliberative democracy into the curriculum of two Alabama public school 6th grade classrooms.
This session will present experiences in working with these 6th graders and explore ideas for future work inside K-12 schools. We invite people to discuss curriculum development and share experiences from similar projects involving deliberation with young audiences.
Hope, Change, and Dialogue in the Midst of Crisis
Daniel Horsey
Academy of Urban Learning
Schools are maelstroms of us-them power struggles: teachers vs. students, clique vs. clique, staff vs. committee, practice vs. theory, etc. Developing a dialogic and deliberative culture without sacrificing the multi-layered structural needs of a complex community requires eternal hope, unending patience, and deep trust in our skills — especially during crises.
Faith-Based Communities Conversation about Healthcare
Linn Groft, The University of Alabama
Anne Wheeler, First United Methodist Church, Birmingham, AL
Alabamians and others around the nation are finding that the ways in which we often engage each other on issues that require difficult choices is both unproductive and divisive. Recently, the challenging issue of health care in our country has left many people feeling frustrated and unsatisfied with the manner in which the conversation is being conducted. In an effort to frame a different kind of conversation that employs a more democratic structure and encourages more deliberative habits, the presenters have partnered with several faith-based communities in the Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Alabama, areas to frame their own discussion of the issue of health care in their community, in the state, and in the nation.
For five weeks, these groups, of approximately 15-20 participants each, met once a week for a conversation series at their respective churches. Throughout the series, participants discussed their own personal interest and investment in the issue, the ways in which they relate to the issue both as an individual and as a group, and the ways in which they relate to each other as a community. Based on these conversations, the presenters framed an issue map, similar to those published by the National Issues Forums Institute. This issue map was brought back to each of the groups to critique and modify so that they can use them within their larger faith communities. At the end of the series, the groups reflected on the process, secured commitments to work with each other further on this issue, and came away with a useful model for discussing difficult choices and sharing what they hold valuable with those in their community.
Based on the experiences of this five week project, this session will explore the nature of sustained interactions on controversial issues in faith-based communities.
Voting to Discern before Voting to Decide
John N. Kelly
The Hub, Bay Area
Participants in civic dialogues can spend a lot of time and energy trying to arrive at shared assumptions and terminology. Voting on the likelihood of several ‘news stories from the future’ can help uncover and clarify assumptions and provide a less stressful form of collaboration as a pre-cursor to deliberating current policy alternatives. This learning exchange will invite participants to vote on the likelihood of future events of concern to students as a way to arrive at common terminology, assumptions and evidence without presuming or pressuring anyone to agree on particular policy positions.
Fostering Deliberative Democracy through Peer-to-Peer Mentoring
Jacob Sherman, Krys Roth, Ian McCann
Portland State University, University Studies Program
How can we, as educators, encourage students from diverse backgrounds to respectfully collaborate and solve problems? What role can peer-to-peer mentoring play in student development? What practices can we use to promote deliberative democracy and help students become responsible citizens? Many tout a “university education” as the answer. However, many educational programs too often focus on a student’s passive acquisition of knowledge, instead of promoting active educational inquiries. This “top-down” approach to education discourages empowerment (Freire, 1970), which has unfortunate political consequences when students fail to recognize that even they have a “place at the table.”
While some educational programs unwittingly stifle student empowerment, other universities practice engaged-learning pedagogies that focus on the co-construction of knowledge by students and teachers, while also breaking down status so learners can connect in more meaningful ways. The Peer Mentors in the University Studies Program at Portland State University practice engaged-learning pedagogies in their classrooms, creating low risk environments where students are encouraged to express their own voice and value the diversity of other perspectives. This generates an honest connection in the classroom and lays the foundation on which a deliberative democracy can be built.
This session will explore the methods that Portland State’s Peer Mentors use to connect with their students, and will challenge participants to think about how they can use engaged-learning pedagogies to foster deliberative democracy on their own campuses.
One Mississippi: Bridging Racial Barriers Through Dialogue
Jake McGraw and Patrick Weems,
University of Mississippi, William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation
One Mississippi is a student-led organization at the University of Mississippi that seeks to overcome racial barriers on campus through dialogue and action. For the past three years, One Mississippi has sponsored a retreat for 80 Ole Miss students to spend a weekend in rural Mississippi discussing the steps that are needed to create an inclusive campus environment for students of all races and backgrounds. These retreats have combined important conversations with new friendships, paving the way toward changing social attitudes and institutions at the university. On our poster and in our presentation, we will discuss the One Mississippi retreats from our perspectives as both organizers and attendees. Particularly, we will focus on how the retreats are organized, the types of activities that take place, and the positive changes that have resulted from them. We will also simulate the type of dialogue that takes place at the retreats through the use of story circles.
Community as Teacher: Teaching Sustainable Relationships
Lydia Atkins, Lucy Bennett, Sarah Massey, and Jay Murphy, University of Alabama
Laura Woolf, Community Music School, University of Alabama
How can community become a teacher in a society that has forgotten its resources? What is a community’s relationship to the education of its youth?
During the months of January through March, 2010, a group of ten 5th grade students at the Tuscaloosa Magnet Elementary School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, are meeting twice a week to interactively experience their regional food culture as it relates to the impact their food choices have on lives inside and outside their community. As citizens, we can engage in relationships within our community by buying our food from a local farmer or by growing our own produce and selling/bartering to our neighbors. Nurturing these relationships focused around food and the well being of a community can foster better habits of deliberative decision making due to a stronger sense of trust and place.
In this learning exchange, we will address these challenges and explore how, by teaching food culture, the use of community resources (farmers, chefs and restaurateurs, locally grown produce, etc.) can teach students about sustainable relationships that form the foundation for sustainable community decisions.