There is a reason the name of my blog post is not Deliberation Essay Rough Draft. I don’t have a rough draft. I just finished writing a research paper for the past ten hours, I don’t have it in me tonight. So, here are my ideas loosely brought together here.
Moderation philosophy:
In my experience as a moderator, I wanted to take the discussion to a deeper level when we talked about sustainability and education, but I also didn’t want to break up good discussion. Everyone was contributing and listening well, talking about their experiences in high school and how it can relate to sustainability. This is really good.
What I wanted to push towards was the actual sustainability of the education in this country. The sustainability of our current education with its current funding levels to keep American students competitive with the rest of the world, or the sustainability of our current University system, as costs continue to rise and the promise of a job coming out of that degree falls apart.
My moderation philosophy is that we can learn as much or more from watching where the discussion takes us rather than it following the course of one person in charge. So I sit back.
Deliberative Process:
I was a little disappointed by our deliberation. The conversation was great in that it was civil, people listened, it stayed on topic, it was supported with facts, and everyone learned from it.
What I didn’t like was that it seemed that most of our conversation was people simply listening to one person’s opinion or experiences, and then responding by telling everyone their opinion or experiences. There were very few questions asked whenever someone made a point, and almost no challenging of viewpoints by another group member. One of the most important parts of good deliberation is the back and forth of people challenging each other to defend themselves, and bring the advantages of their vision to the forefront.
I think this is representative of deliberation as a whole in this country. There is a lot of hesitation when it comes to challenging another person when deliberating in person, or even online when you try to remain civil. Recently, there was a facebook group made for the purpose of 138 deliberation, a great idea, except lest a few people who were asking good questions and challenging each other, the comment list is simply a lot of people stating their opinions on a matter.
On the other extreme, a lot of online deliberation is behind the protection of a screen and keyboard, so people violently yell at each other for no reason, pointing fingers, calling names, making generalizations, and forgetting the purpose of deliberation. In my personal online experience, I was called a heart-beating liberal, told I was in Bob Casey’s pocket, and called ignorant because I believe that the gender wage gap is a real thing. I like to think that I am not ignorant, but I am positive that I am not a polarizing liberal.
Just 500 words of starting ideas.
