Description
Research on the civic education of young people has been the focus of a diverse and multinational group of scholars collaborating with the Kettering Foundation since 2011. With a growing number of engaged pedagogical tools being developed, such as story circles, sustained dialogues, intergroup dialogues, and national issues forums; schools and campuses are more engaged in promoting public talk about divisive issues, even though it’s often under the radar. In the process, the authors unearthed a method of civic education which they termed “deliberative pedagogy” (Shaffer, Longo, Manosovich, & Thomas, 2017). As a method of civic education, deliberative pedagogy integrates deliberative processes with teaching, learning, and engagement—in both classroom and community settings. The work of deliberative pedagogy is ultimately about space-making: by creating and holding space for authentic and productive dialogue, conversations that can ultimately be not only educational, but also transformative. In our teaching and learning practice, we need to create environments that can facilitate an explicit link between the knowledge and theory students acquire in schools on the one hand, and learning how to “be” and “act” in new ways in world: in our case, to be and act in the world as civic professionals.