Overall, I thought that this deliberation project brought upon many good conversations about the issues we face in the world, and I definitely enjoyed this project. It ended up being a lot less stressful than I thought it would be, as sitting in a circle having a regular conversation creates much less social anxiety than doing an official presentation standing up in front of the class. Unfortunately, I was not in class for the standardized testing deliberation, but I was present for everything else.
I’ll be using Gastil’s Deliberative Criteria to analyze both my experience facilitating a deliberation as well as being a participant.
Picking from the analytic process of Gastil’s criteria, my group did a good job “creating a solid information base” as we took an uncommon topic and explained the situation as best as we could to our audience. Before this project, I had no idea what Cancer Alley was until Katie proposed it as a possible topic for our deliberation. I searched up articles about this area and was very surprised that this has not been covered on the news as much as it should have. We wrote in our overview and introduction with key details about the area and the pollutants in order for everyone in the room to grasp a basic understanding of the problem in Louisiana.
Another criteria we instinctively used as a part of Gastil’s criteria is that we “prioritized the key values at stake” as we realize that we value having the right to clean air and minimal toxic pollutants in the air. Our values were agreed upon with the others in the deliberation, and we all reflected on these key values of keeping the air clean. While it is difficult to decide to terminate the factories due to economic loss, it is evident that the lives of the residents are more important as they are at a much greater risk to get cancer and have a shorter life-span.
The last criteria we used in our facilitated deliberation would be that we “weighed the pros, cons, and trade-offs among solutions” as we created clear advantages and disadvantages for each solution we proposed. We knew that each of our solutions had a big drawback to them, for example, some of our solutions would have been to terminate production of the factories or relocate the people. We realized that these were major drawbacks to our solutions and we made it clear that we needed to assess which solution would have less of a harmful impact. One would impact the economy or the other would affect the already negatively impacted lives of those who live there.
Switching to analyzing the deliberations I participated in through Gastil’s Deliberative Criteria, I would say that the “Justice in the Court” deliberation was most successful in using the “ensure mutual comprehension” criteria. Specifically, Leigh was very clear when she was speaking about her approach and she was very open to any possible confusion. She clarified things very well and I enjoyed the freedom and clarity to express confusion within their topic.
Another criteria that was used was “adequately distribute speaking opportunities” which I would believe was best done in the “Homelessness on Skid Row” deliberation as they had a clear timer when the allocated time was up and the moderation worked very smoothly. I feel like this criteria could have been worked on better in our group, as I was trying to stop people from going overtime but it was very difficult on Zoom since I felt awkward unmuting to interrupt.
Lastly, the most important criteria would be to “respect other participants” which I believed all deliberation groups did very well. They all respected everyone’s views when they spoke, and they acknowledged their viewpoints with respect. Every group had some people disagreeing, and the facilitating group handled it very well as they realize that everyone has different life experiences and this deliberation is not a debate, but rather a discussion.