Deliberative Pedagogy (Transformations in Higher Education) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michigan State University Press
Published: 2017-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

Russian and American Students Deliberating Online: Complementing Core Courses with Intercultural Communication Skills

Ekaterina Lukianova and Jack Musselman

T his chapter describes a joint deliberation exercise in which American and Russian university students engaged in online discussions of a thorny issue with relevance across societies. But what do we mean by “deliberation exercise” in an international context, when students are not from the same country, much less members of the same campus community? In the Anglo-Saxon academic culture, particularly in the United States, deliberation is often associated with democratic politics, in part because of the influence of the deliberative democracy movement. Yet, deliberation may be said to transcend specific forms of government considered desirable or undesirable at a given point in history by any one society. In fact, as a pedagogical tool, deliberation may have a more profound impact when used to connect participants whose governments or societies have diverging ideologies. Our experience illustrated that in the global context, classroom discussions and online interactions that connect students from different countries are accessible ways to practice deliberative pedagogies.

To that end, our exercise involved students from two universities: Saint Petersburg State University, a large public university in Russia, and St. Edward’s University, a small private liberal arts college in Austin, Texas. The Russian students were master’s-level English and cultural studies majors, enrolled in an advanced English writing class. The Americans were bachelor’s-level students, many prelaw, enrolled in a legal ethics class. In the fall of 2014, these two groups engaged in a multifaceted deliberation on the issue of corruption and various ways of approaching it in their respective countries. The deliberation process included separate in-class discussions that were shared between classes, a joint discussion in a closed online forum, and an exchange of essays.

The two instructors who led the exchange met at a Kettering Foundation meeting in Dayton, Ohio. This setting allowed us to negotiate the complexity involved in creating an in-depth dialogic exchange between classes at universities in different countries. Our partnership was designed to meet both deliberative goals and the specific needs of the classes and institutions that it connected. The broader goal of this project was to encourage cross-cultural understanding among students with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints, with an eye toward preparing students for real-world encounters that can provide thoughtful solutions to difficult social issues. The topic of corruption was chosen for its relevance to both groups of students while offering room for divergent opinions and proposed approaches. We sought to help students reflect on culturally specific dimensions of the issue, while developing skills such as information sharing and negotiating value conflicts both within and between cultures. By embedding such dialogues within existing courses, we were also able to meet the specific goals of our respective classes. The legal ethics class at St. Edward’s University aimed to help students learn from moral and political perspectives about the legal profession that differed from their own. The opinion-writing class at Saint Petersburg State University aimed to inform students’ writing by helping them develop sensitivity to language as a means of encoding values.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.