Teachers' Perspectives on the Challenges of Conducting Deliberations on Public Policy Issues

• In Event: Telling Fact From Fiction and Other Challenges in Enacting High-Quality Civic Education

Abstract

Objectives
This study explores challenges encountered by four high school teachers as they attempted to conduct public policy deliberations with students. Classroom composition, specifically the racial/ethnic and economic diversity (or lack of diversity), was a main challenge that manifested itself in each classroom.

Perspectives
Discussion and deliberation of public issues are central to civic education and social studies (Shaver, 1989). Such practices ideally rest on claims and evidence (Asen et al., 2013). Teachers play a critical role in shaping the conditions of the “political classroom” (Hess & McAvoy, 2015), but the “how-to” of creating a culture of evidence use in deliberation remains an under-explored topic in civic education.
Specifically, classroom composition plays a key role in shaping deliberations. Diverse classrooms experience lower levels of social trust (Bădescu & Sum, 2015) and conflicting perspectives on the trustworthy nature of evidence (Authors, 2016). Discussions in these classrooms are susceptible to dominance by high-status members (e.g., men, Whites) (Sunstein, 2001). Similarly, homogeneous classrooms also present challenges, albeit different kinds (McAvoy, Hess, & Kawashima-Ginsberg, 2014). Sunstein (2001) characterizes these types of deliberations among like-minded people as “enclave deliberation,” which, he argues, “raises serious difficulties” (p. 16).

Method, Data Sources, and Analysis
Participants are four high school social studies teachers and their students (N=90). School sites differed in their racial/ethnic and socio-economic status student composition. The data sources are video-recordings and transcripts of six deliberations and teacher interviews. The topics of the deliberations were immigration policy and Internet privacy. We analyzed the data by looking at patterns and themes within and across the data sources (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014).

Results
Classroom demographic composition was a critical factor shaping deliberations, influencing both the procedural and content dimensions of the deliberations. Procedurally, in classrooms where the composition was homogenous, teachers wanted to see a wider range of viewpoints discussed, but struggled with the degree to which they ought to be the ones interjecting those ideas. Procedurally, teachers in these environments struggled to balance facilitating vs. directing the conversation. Similarly, in the diverse classroom, the teacher wanted to ensure that students in the minority were given an opportunity to share their differing points of view, but hesitated for fear his authority was endorsing a particular point of view.
Classroom composition also impacted the content of the deliberations. In the two higher-SES classrooms, students’ contributions in the immigration policy deliberation were more abstract and disembodied compared to the deliberation in the lower-SES classroom, where contributions were more impassioned and personal (Authors, 2017).

Scholarly Significance
The complex and varied ways classroom demographics influence deliberations suggest greater support is needed for teachers seeking to use deliberation. Homogeneous classrooms and diverse classrooms present different challenges. Regardless of the classroom composition, deliberations are more generative, thought-provoking, civil, and equitable when skillfully conducted by a facilitator, when participants are provided “full information” (Sunstein, p. 18) on the issue at hand, and when students recognize their own biases and recognize the value of considering diverse perspectives from their own.

Authors

• Anne-Lise F. Halvorsen, Michigan State University

• Avner Segall, Michigan State University

• Margaret S. Crocco, Michigan State University

• Rebecca Jacobsen, Michigan State University