Online Deliberation: Bridging Divides and Navigating "Niceness"

• In Event: Making It Real: Taking Action in Teaching

Abstract

In advancing their institutional civic missions, faculty are teaching deliberation skills, using deliberation as a method of working through the complexities of a jointly experienced problem, and encouraging civic engagement. Much of this good work happens on individual campuses that are increasingly class, race, and ideologically homogenous or as part of one-off classroom activities in siloed disciplines. As campuses trend toward sameness, we introduce and study online deliberation and its effect on student learning and civic behaviors. The National Issues Forum Institute (NIFI) uses the Common Ground for Action (CGA) online deliberation platform to break through geographic and ideological silos by organizing a week of forums that pair rural and urban campuses, small private liberal arts with large agricultural or tech schools, religious and nonreligious, and all things in between. We analyze 15 NIF forum deliberation transcripts as well as post-forum survey results from several in-class CGA deliberative forums to evaluate the impact deliberating online has on student civic behaviors. We find that the specific and unique value that CGA brings to student civic engagement and to deliberation overall cannot be overstated. Leveraging CGA’s unique chat, action-drawback focus, and in-real-time graphical representation of group judgments means students can find and see the common ground they share with peers from different places and walks of life. For students who are nervous about sharing views in the polarized and divisive environment, being able to privately rank and then, in aggregate, formally see their judgments as part of the group, not in contrast to, it means they may more directly see themselves as part of a collective citizenry with a shared understanding and purpose. As an experiment to build civic capacity through deliberation and to share understanding across differences, online deliberation allows students a unique way to deliberate while still discovering the human connections that can bridge political and social differences in order to address real, wicked issues.

Authors

• Kara N Dillard, James Madison University

• Kara L. Lindaman, Winona State University