Reflection

1. Discuss personal and emotional experiences, as well as known facts: During our group’s deliberation, Ali Ryder facilitated and moderated the personal stake portion of the deliberation. She utilized the Zoom chat feature and read selected responses. Personal stakes with the issue of compensating college athletes included friends and siblings of current college athletes. A common theme among these individuals was that their friends and siblings attended the college that provided the best scholarship package. As a participant in the other deliberation, I did not always have a personal state in the issue being presented, but a common theme throughout was that most of the issues resolved around education and health. Hearing about other’s own personal stakes when I myself did not have anything invested in the issue helped me gain a better appreiciation for the issue at hand and the stakeholders involved.
2. Brainstorm a wide variety of ways to address the problem: For our group’s deliberation, we came up with three distinct approaches: paying college athletes solely for the use of their likenesses, providing a salary equivalent to a student part-time job, and allowing incentive-based contracts. The values embedded in each approach were fairness, equality, and competition, respectively. Each approach was presented for equal amounts of time, and then the group’s approach experts moderated discussion questions to further understand the advantages and drawbacks of each approach. Our approaches were not equally supported (approaches 1 and 3 seemed mixed at best whole approach 2 was almost unanimously disliked). This was in contrast to other groups because as a participant in the other deliberations, there was usually one approach that essentially everyone agreed upon.
3. Update your own opinion in light of what you have learned. No joint decision need be reached: For my specific approach (providing college athletes with a regularly paid salary), the deliberation helped me realize that its intended goal of equality only applied to college athletes rather than the student body as a whole. To fund this initative, student fees would have to be increased and/or athletic coaches would have to be paid less while some part-time student workers and adjunct college professor already are not compensated enough. Are sports more valuable than academics in the eyes of colleges beyond revenue? This philosophic discussion helped me realize the values college students hold regarding the standing of student athletes.
4. Take turns in conversation or take other action to ensure a balanced discussion: For the discussion portion of each deliberation, each approach moderator would ask a discussion question. Participants were free to respond if they had something to add. Moderators took a laissez-faire approach in dedicating most of the discussion time to participant-generated dialogue. This allowed the issue to be better understand in context to participants’ own values and beliefs. When I was a partipciant for the other deliberations, I made sure I didn’t dominate the conversation or speak too much. It was important for me to listen more rather than talk too much to understand the diversity of experiences, opinions, and responses present.
5. Listen carefully to what others say, especially when you disagree: For two of our approaches, there was some mixed responses. Even though people disagreed on certain aspects of these ideas, they still remained respectful and were listened to. For example, one participant acknowledged that student athletes are exploited by EA Sports by the use of their likenesses in video games, so they should be compensated while another partipciant argued that even though that was morally wrong, student athletes shouldn’t be paid because their love of their sport is enough. This also occurred for approach three when one student thought that player-based incentives allow individual athletes to improve and get better while another student disagreed and thought that team-based incentives would be more appropriate since most college sports are about  team peformance rather than individual performance.
6. Speak plainly to each other and ask for clarifaction when confused: When planned discussion questions did not generate response initially, moderators rephrased it in a different way to make it clearer for the participants. Also, moderators sometimes paraphrased participants’ responses for concision and/or clarity purposes. This allowed the participants to better understand their fellow participants’ responses and generated further discussion once they better understand what was originally meant.