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Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

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According to recent survey polling from the Wall Street Journal, the share of Americans who say they value being involved in their community has sharply declined over the last several decades. Similarly, tolerance for others deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has now fallen to 58% illustrating stark political polarization that may play a role in dwindling levels of civic engagement. These growing divides are part of what prompted the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware to partner with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation in launching a new civil discourse pilot program in the fall of 2021. Tim, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:36] Tim Shaffer: It’s wonderful to be here. Thanks.

[00:01:37] Bonni: I am so grateful to have been introduced to your work and what a pleasure it is to get to know you a little bit today. As you know already, I just wrapped up graduation. It’s a darn good thing this is not a video podcast because I’ve got a case of hat head but other than that, I think I’m ready to go.

[00:01:55] Timothy: I always tell my students I love graduation because I bought my regalia as a doctoral student and it’s not cheap. I think about it as price per wear, so I try to wear it as much as I can, but it’s not really the thing you wear to the grocery store or other things. The first year of COVID when everything really just shut down and we were all trying to figure out what in the world we were doing that first spring, I actually marched around my front yard and had one of my children record me on my phone and I sent it to my students as a celebratory moment in honor of it. Yes, regalia is a lot of fun, but those hats don’t help anybody I don’t think.

[00:02:32] Bonni: [laughs] No. I so enjoyed getting to research your work a bit before today’s conversation. I just want to share a quick anecdote about early in my teaching career. I’ve been at this for almost 20 years. I have been very interested in politics and those kinds of conversations about really important matters. Even though it’s not my discipline, I went to a debate at my institution and yes, Tim, I was incredibly naïve. I watched the people who were attending go around and tell the people to go to the table where they were taking people’s perspectives and give the opposite answer of how they felt about something so their team could win.

I have air quotes going since it’s an audio, and I thought, “Well, this is a horrible way of learning about things, is to manipulate your answers in advance so your team can win.” Then there wasn’t a lot of really defining of terms in advance. Fast forwarding all these decades later and being introduced to your work, I was instantly intrigued and so grateful for the work that you and so many do researching this area. Would you first share with us about focusing more on discourse than debate?

[00:03:48] Timothy: It’s a great question and I think for a lot of us maybe experiences as students in things like high school or even our own undergraduate experience, I remember the pro-con books around the pros and cons of American history or the whatever else. There’s something to be said about digging into questions in a way that you are advocating for a certain position. I think a lot of that’s what leads into this debate framework. When we talk about the roots of these words, I think there’s something really striking to remember that, especially in the dialogue deliberation world. Debate often carries this connotation of it’s bad. The root of the word debate really literally means to beat down. To fight.

There’s a winner, there is a loser. As someone who has been a tenured faculty member in a communication studies department in the past and the home of a really good competitive debate team, I would often get reminded that debate’s not really this total boogeyman. It’s a great opportunity. I had that qualifying statement for that. I think more generally not just as a pedagogy, but as a disposition, when we think about how do we have difference and how do we engage each other, that orientation only gets us so far and it sets us up and in some ways of being clearly cut, like, this is good, this is bad. I won that one. That stuff. In contrast to how we often think about things like dialogue or even say deliberation, moving more towards debate. In one of our books Creating Space for Democracy– In one of these tables, it’s all about roots and meanings of these words.

We break this down from things like debate and discussion, conversation to dialogue and liberation. As you move more in that dialogic direction this language of this sense of exchange and this flow of meaning, it’s through between, across, that stuff. It starts to have these different connotations that I think open up the possibilities of being more potentially constructive with other people. When we think about that in classrooms or we think about that in communities or whatever that environment might be, it just starts to I think set the table for a different way of being with one another.

Instead of showing up and being like, I’m going to win this, and I just have to queue up in my mind what’s the thing that’s going to knock them down or elevate the position I have, it’s how do I step into this and say I’ve got some views and I’ve got some knowledge, this sort of stuff, and yet what do I not know or experience that could inform and shape how I think about this thing, whatever it might be, or let alone the people that I’m talking to? I have found that for a long time as somebody who now studies this, but in practicing in different contexts, a lot of community-based work and things like that, that this is what helps groups of people do the collective work that often is required of us to do in some society where we’re not all the same.

We’re not homogenous in a lot of respects. If we really want to value that, how do we help create those conditions? That’s where the dialogue, deliberation work as a contrast to debate can be really helpful. For students, I will say it’s such a contrast because they’re really not accustomed to that, right? They’re usually priming for what’s the professor want me to say? I’m trying to get this quite right in contrast to adding in a slightly more incremental way, some collective knowledge about the thing in contrast to just getting the right answer.

[00:07:27] Bonni: Is there a story that comes to mind with you either in a classroom or perhaps in a community where someone with significantly less knowledge and expertise than you have in a particular area did inform and shape your thinking? Or perhaps someone in the room that you just got to observe who had a lot more power or a lot more knowledge where that beginner’s mind, a novice perspective, actually illuminated something, again, either for you or for someone that you got to observe.

[00:07:57] Timothy: Yes, gosh, this is a which one do you pick situation?

[00:08:02] Bonni: Bonni: Glad to hear that.

[00:08:04] Timothy: It’s a great question. Especially in higher education for a lot of us, we’re prepared. We are professionalized in a way that moves us. I always have to remind these undergrad students when they’re like, “I was just walking down the sidewalk a couple weeks ago, having this conversation of when you have that realization of an undergraduate degree really is about this broad sweep of understanding what does it mean to be a human? How do we make sense of information? What’s all this stuff going on? As you move up, especially in an academic way from maybe Master’s into PhD and things like that you’re focusing in on the content, the methods, maybe the focus, the area that you’re exploring, all that stuff.

For a lot of us in higher ED, I think there’s that moment that we can know a whole lot about less in some ways that we feel more justified in making certain claims. Paradoxically, you also recognize how little you know about a bunch of stuff because more about some, but not all. I think there’s something really fascinating, particularly when we think about things like epistemology in higher ED and really wrestle with what does that even mean? Not just as a topic for a seminar class, but fundamentally how do we know? A big part of my research now and shaping now really back into graduate school and earlier was this recognition of knowledge exists in lots of places.

Frank Fisher, who wrote a lot about democracy and expertise, he’s a retired professor now, professor emeritus at Rutgers. It really just turned me on to how do we think about technical knowledge and expertise and lay knowledge? I was really fascinated actually, particularly I stopped doing this line of research in my doctoral program, but around the role of emotion and deliberation and there were all these stories of how there were issues going on. In a lot of ways we set up the panel of the experts in the front of the room, and they’re going to tell everybody, “This is what’s going on,” or “If you choose this, this is going to happen.” Here’s your Smorgasbord of things, and here it is. There’s this one clipping of the paper I was collecting all this stuff at that time. It was this line about basically this transformative issue in a community and basically, the folks who are showing up, who were going to be most directly affected by whatever decision was made. It was like, “Leave your emotions at the door.”

I just remember being struck by that of, “What is it that makes it so easy for us to shut out certain ways of experiencing the world and seeing it?” We’re having some visceral reaction to what’s going on. It’s a little bit different than what you were asking but in a more direct way. I like books. This is audio, so there’s no visual component to justify or–

[00:10:53] Bonni: Close your eyes unless you’re driving.

[00:10:58] Timothy: Imagine, I’ve had people walk into my office for the first time. They’re like, “Oh, yes, this is exactly what I thought,” so there’s just stacks and all this sort of stuff. One of the books that is on my desk now, and I’m just rereading it again, looking at it in a slightly more cursory way this time, but it’s called Braiding Sweetgrass. The subtitle is Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Not so much the plant piece to me. I think when we think about who knows and what do they know that so often we can, I think, default into that category of, oh, they’re a PhD, if we’re talking about higher ed, or, “They’re the person who’s the local government,” or “They’re the planner and so let them tell us what we should do or go on,” in contrast to the person who’s lived in the place for maybe decades.

When I mentioned Fisher, he’s got some fascinating work off of communities decades ago, who were recognizing there’s a cancer cluster. What’s going on? What are the environmental factors that couldn’t be fixed or figured out by the outside experts? It turned out it was all the moms and the community who figured it out. When we think about that, how do we recognize and value that, I think, is a really, really important thing.

As we prepare students, no matter what level of education we’re doing, is to remind them as much as we acquire the technical knowledge and then the greater expertise about it, that we shouldn’t shut out others who don’t have those credentials and also for ourselves, like we might be able to speak from a place that’s not only lined up in the way that seems like that’s how we’re supposed to know something so at the heart of all of this dialogue deliberation work, really is this sense of how do we create space for not be able to just have conversation, but for us to do, I think, the difficult work of making democracy work as it should and that being rooted in the idea of people having a sense of power and agency over their lives.

[00:12:57] Bonni: Allow me to take you briefly back to that debate or some of the early debates that I attended at the university where I work. I was incredibly frustrated in a debate about universal health care where most of the people in the room weren’t paying for their own insurance, didn’t have experience with what co-pays were, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, we need to define our terms.”

I’ve thought about that since then so many times of before you start to decide whether you agree or disagree with something that might be helpful, but in doing some research to prepare for today, you were able to introduce me to the work of Daniel Yankelovich. I really liked this idea because I thought, “No, it’s not just the words. That’s not what’s missing. It’s consciousness-raising.” Would you talk a little bit about his model and how that fits in with deliberative pedagogy and what I may have seen was missing in the room way back then?

[00:13:58] Timothy: Yes, Dan Yankelovich was this really fascinating person. The joke is people who knew him, I didn’t get to know him, but he was one of these pollsters doing public opinion work. All the names that we would think about now today as the names of the polls that we would just recognize as these are the organizations that do polling, he was one of them. Gallup and others, they were like friends, and so it’s always funny to remember these are people who were doing this sort of stuff. What he came to realize, and I think this is true for higher ed, but it’s also true when you’re going into election cycles and everything else, anytime you hear there was a survey that talked to such and such and whatever percentage of people say a thing, those are always snapshots in time.

There’s that moment. There’s this literally whether it’s, maybe in the past, on a phone or on a cell phone now or online or whatever it is, but wherever this is occurring, those are just these truly a snapshot. It’s uninformed. It’s just eliciting a response. What do you think about X? Yankelovich recognized this. He wrote a couple of books that are really relevant to this, but there’s one in particular called Coming To Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World, early ’90s, I think it was ’91 if I’m remembering correctly.

His whole concept that he really introduced, which I use and lots of others, it’s included in some of the work that we do, and the two books particularly, the Deliberative Pedagogy, which was the foundation for some of the work that I and others are doing, giving some language to it, and then follow up, the Creating Space for Democracy book in 2017 and ’19 respectively. Yankelovich really talks about this like coming to public judgment. Public judgment was going from that place of there’s a thing going on basically awareness of, it it existing, and before we come to that place of resolution, there’s this big hill you got to climb to that, and this big chunk of moving from that first place of, “Oh, thing. Going on,” to resolution, understanding, whatever it might be on that other end is that public judgment piece.

What that means is we got to think about where do we get information, how do we think about it, again back to that polling piece, not just as some snapshot, but over some period of time as an individual trying to understand what’s going on, but most likely and typically, and this is where the polling that he started to do shaped by all this sort of work was in collective sorts of ways where people were learning and listening with one another, really thinking about this. The book that he wrote a few years after this called The Magic of Dialogue, and that was in the late ’90s, subtitle, Transforming Conflict into Cooperation. I’m going to give myself points if I’m actually correct on both of those subtitles, by the way.

He actually has this great graphic in that book about setting up differences between debate and dialogue, which I would use and use all the time in workshops and things like that. This whole public judgment orientation, I think, is a really helpful and important one because it moves us from, and we can think about in classes, we can think about it in co-curricular learning, we can think, whatever the situations might be, is, how do we move from, “Hey, what do you think about this?”

I say the thing and I walk away we don’t do anything more with it so even like, pre-post sort of stuff, we could think about it in some ways like that or what are these processes and to stay in the academic world here for a moment, for a semester-long experience, what is it that helps us not just talk about doing that sort of thing, but how do we actually do that in the places where we have some level of agency and influence, whether it’s a classroom, whether it’s a residence hall, some student group, whatever it might be, to where you can actually do some of that sort of stuff to where we come to understand, what is going on? How do we collectively wrestle with some of this really complex content and also not just learning more about the thing that we’re talking about, but also the people who are involved and so that’s where this collective effort here to me is really important.

[00:18:25] Bonni: I think this would be a great time for you to share a bit about the SNF Ithaca Initiative and some of the ways that that work is supporting the kinds of things that you’re talking about here.

[00:18:38] Timothy: Here at the Biden School of Public Policy & Administration at the University of Delaware, we’ve launched in 2021 something called the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Ithaca Initiative, SNF Ithaca for short. It is very much rooted in a lot of these themes that we’ve been talking about. It’s fundamentally about what does it mean to be a citizen in the world, but more than that, what does it mean to be a democratic citizen so that’s really important as a qualifier.

We think there are these three pillars of what makes that possible so civil discourse is really essential, civic engagement, and this third, that we’re really adding to those two, median democracy is one way to talk about it, but really it’s more this mediated public square. The way that I shorthand this is how do we talk to each other, how do we act with one another, and also how do we understand all that within the world that we exist in? Most of how we exist today is mediated. It’s how we get information, it’s how we communicate with one another, whether it’s on Zoom or on the phone, it’s even just like everyday interactions.

A colleague of mine, he studies media here with me as well. He always makes this point. He’s like, “It’s down to the cup of coffee.” He’s like, “Unless you’re drinking my coffee,” he’s like, “It’s mediated.” I’m telling you, it’s pretty good, or not. I think we have to recognize that we, today, especially when we’re talking about social media and the like, are in such an environment that it’s really important for us not just to take that as a given, but we really need to be critical and thoughtful about that. SNF Ithaca really is geared towards this question of what does it mean to be an active and engaged citizen.

For us, a lot of that is for undergraduate students we have a student leaders program that we have students from across the university who are part of it, all sorts of majors. We have some policy majors, but also international relations. We have one who’s a biochem major who’s really interested in religious dialogue. We’ve got this whole mix of folks walking from different, I think, disciplinary perspectives, but also different experiences and places that is really rich. One of our annual signature events that we do, we have fellows who come to campus to do workshops and talks. They come into classes. In fact, there’s one here literally right now who’s been here for the last two days talking about media and its role in democracy appropriately.

We have opportunities for folks to join us to complement the conversations and the research that we’re doing in-house. We have multiple events that are for this broader network that we’re helping to cultivate. One of them is through our SNF Ithaca National Student Dialogue. We had about 100 students from around the country join us earlier this semester from research-intensive universities to regional public schools, to small liberal arts colleges, to historically Black institutions. We’ve got a mixed geography, ideological diversity. Literally Harvard and Chicago and Ohio State and Tennessee, University of Central Florida, Berkeley. We’ve got the mix. Providence College.

It’s just all over the board. Simpson College in Iowa. Literally, I think we’ve only got so much bandwidth, but helping bring folks together who wouldn’t really be showing up to engage with one another. We integrate civil discourse into public policy so they’re showing up and saying, “We’ve got some issues going on where we are,” they help to identify that, and we give them some tools to where they learn over the course of a few days with one another. They literally workshop. What are we going to do? What is the issue? How do we name it? How do we talk about the stakeholders? What are our processes of actually engaging them to address this thing that we say is pretty important? Then they take it home.

As we learned from last year, some places actually redesigned their welcome orientation experience to say, we need to be able to talk about this stuff, this polarization, this partisanship from the get-go. They talked to residence life, student life people, all the appropriate channels, and they did it. I think one of our hopes is really to help build this network, this culture to where that’s a practice for students. We’re continuing to expand that. We have a network for scholars as well who are either directing these programs or connected in some fashion. As we continue to expand this, particularly into this media and democracy space, yet again saying, who needs to be in these conversations?

Who’s doing, I think, the real work here of the scholarship, the research, the writing about it, but also teaching it? Also, interacting with the students who are thinking about these things, or maybe not thinking about it, but maybe they should that sort of thing.

[00:23:27] Bonni: So many things struck me and stood out as I reviewed your so many webinars and articles and all of that. One thing I think would be really interesting to people listening is that you talk about going beyond teaching about something. I don’t know if skills is too elementary of a word to use, but you’ve literally got ways of gauging the extent to which you’re seeing deliberative approaches come forth, and you talk about sometimes seeing failure, and let’s try that again. I’m curious to hear you talk a little bit as your own teaching has evolved and you’ve learned how to do this better. Where do you see most people struggling with getting to where they need to get to be effective at these kinds of approaches?

[00:24:19] Timothy: I’m going to hesitate to say just buy the book, but a place that might be helpful is on page 195 of Deliberative Pedagogy. Joking aside, one of the things in there that we recognized is that a lot of people who do this work do it from a place of values and conviction. We recognize that we want to do the work that we do as educators in a certain way. There’s a part of this that’s just so value-laden that regardless of maybe the measurable outcomes, we’re going to do it. Then there’s that other piece of like, “Well, but does it really have some of the effects that we’re want to think about it?” I think just to name some of that.

I’m pointing to one of the chapters in Deliberative Pedagogy is this learning outcomes rubric, which is super helpful to talk about this developmental place of how do we think about things like collaboration and reason-giving and the ability to synthesize ideas and information? Think about trade-offs and tensions, reflection, relationship, sympathy? Those categories and looking at it from a standpoint of where is it starting. For collaboration, I’ll just use this as an example, going from prioritizing one’s self-interest and opinions all the way to the other end. This capstone deliberating, as it’s referred to here, is understanding civic responsibility and demonstrates a commitment to work with others to come to shared decisions.

Those are really different ways of thinking about how do we look at these things and approach it in particular ways. I think I strayed a little bit from your question. How do we actually do this and what are some of the challenges that students have, I’ll just say plainly here, is I think a lot of students, most students, not all students, but most, walk in and sit in a chair and look at you and are waiting for your slides to talk about the thing so chapter whatever. We’re going to go that way and I’m going to prepare for the next quiz or the test or whatever the signpost is that we’re really accustomed to.

Myself included, a lot of the people who do this work buck some of those models and it’s really uncomfortable and jarring for students, I think, at first. This idea of, I’ve done ungrading in a lot of these courses. We do a lot of experience so we’re not just reading about how do we have deliberation, but we’re doing it. We’re using process models in class to talk about real things. Then talking about that too of like, why is this particularly different? In our Creating Space for Democracy book, we lean on a streams of engagement model from something called the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. It’s super helpful because it’s one thing just to say that we should talk to each other. Well, yes.

That sounds really good. Depending on what you’re trying to do, there are different processes and structures that are going to help you accomplish that because there’s nothing more frustrating than walking in– I’m going to talk about a community conversation environment here for a moment, but there’s nothing more frustrating than walking into some meeting where you’ve tried to figure out like child care and dinner for other things … after hours and all of a sudden you think you’re going to resolve something and two hours later you walk out and you say, nothing’s been resolved. This is actually just more complicated.

Setting clear outs on the outset, expectations of what we’re going to do, this is a one-time conversation or this is going to be months. We’re going to meet every few weeks. We’re going to build sustained dialogue, for example. From the onset, it has to do that. It doesn’t accomplish what it’s designed to do. When we think about that from an experience in a classroom or where it goes beyond that, I think having a calibrated for what you’re trying to-are we just trying to have exploratory conversation, are we just trying to start to get to know each other or the thing that we’re talking about or are we really deciding?

Those are two really different things, all under the big umbrella of civil discourse, dialogue, deliberation. It matters of how we approach what we’re trying to do because there’s nothing worse than feeling like you wasted your time. I think for students too, I think not just to talk about it, but to actually experience it in a way of like, “Oh, that’s really different.” Right now I have students who we did a few different processes and there’s a beautiful model called Story Circles. It’s really simple. You sit down, you have a prompt, everybody has a set amount of time, all equal, and you don’t get to interrupt. You don’t even get to ask questions until everybody goes. Then there’s a next phase.

That’s super awkward for some people because they really want to say something. They want to jump in. Last semester, for example, I did this in one of these courses that I teach, a foundational class to SNF Ithaca and there was one group that got really deep. I wasn’t in that conversation. There were a bunch of little clusters in class and they were literally tearful. They said they’re like, “I’ve never done something like that in a classroom.” I didn’t think I would, but because of where it went, the vulnerability.

We were deep into a semester and I think they felt more comfortable doing that which is an important thing to say here. You don’t just walk in the first day and be like, “Hey, we’re going to spell our guts to each other, or we’re going to become open in a way that I don’t know that person sitting beside me.” There comes a point where there’s a willingness. I think literally today, I’m not even lying about this just because we’re on a podcast.

[00:29:53] Bonni: [laughs] You lie when you’re not on podcasts but …

[00:29:55] Timothy: Exactly. I’m just a rampant liar when I’m not on a podcast. That’s just who I am.

[00:29:58] Bonni: It’s good to meet you in this context.

[00:30:01] Timothy: No, no, this is great. This is great. I was saying to a student, I was walking down the sidewalk who I’m trying to recruit one of these students to be in our program next student leaders program. The other person is a graduating senior who if she wasn’t a senior I would be hounding her to be in the program too. I said, I was like this is one of the really, I don’t want to say heartbreaking things about being a professor, but there comes this moment where these two students were both I’d say timid quiet in the front of the room. Very good students but just not vocal in a lot of ways.

Now they’re just, there’s just such a level of comfort. They’re really thoughtful. They bring so much, and the student is now going to graduate. I was saying to her this is the sad part in a semester long experience when you get to meet somebody like her and saying this to her, “You’re about out the door.” We’re just getting to that place where we’re really starting to feel like we could really talk about this stuff in a collective way. Not just in the one-on-one, and then you’re gone.

I’m waving goodbye and saying best of luck in your future endeavors. I think that’s the really fascinating thing about this work. When you have these moments, these moments of glimpsing into who they are beyond the veneer of being a student in the class, taking the test and the quizzes and all this stuff, because we do all sorts of experiential stuff. We’re using different ways of assessment. My hope always is, I think for this particular student, that she’s going to go off and do other things, and this is the I think the stickiness of some of this work.

You may not be walking around talking about citations for Yankelovich, 1991. I don’t think she’s going to be doing that in the future, but I think she is going to recognize, there’s a different way for me to be in the world that could be shaped by this model. Whether it’s in a workplace, maybe it’s with interpersonal relationships with family, friends, things like that. There’s another way of being, because so much of our environment right now is we hear these narratives It’s deeply polarized, it’s partisan and they all know it. They all experience it.

They’re living in this. When we have the opportunity to see another way of talking about something like politics, we can wrestle with these, we’re talking about policy issues. A lot because it’s a policy course, and these are all choices that people in communities make, and we have to recognize there are ways in which we can approach that in a slightly different way. What opportunities exist when we do that. When we recognize, you’ve got a different angle on this but if we can talk about that, there might be something that we actually agree on underneath it. The positions are not necessarily the same as the values that are shaping it. If we can I think as educators help create those conditions for students to not just intellectualize that, but actually experience that. I think we’re all the better.

[00:32:56] Bonni: This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I wanted to recommend a podcast that relates to something that shows up in your work. You said it during this episode, Tim, and that has to do with naming things. There is a beautiful podcast episode, where Anderson Cooper interviews Stephen Colbert, and it’s the only episode of this series that I’ve listened to. There’s a whole series that Anderson Cooper is doing about grief. This particular episode is called Grateful for Grief. Tim Wyatt reminds me of that, just the power that it can be when we settle ourselves down and we actually name things, how incredibly transformative that can be.

They both speak so openly and heartbreaking but powerful ways about their own experiences with grief and heartbreak. One part of the episode and I can’t even remember which one of these two men that it was that that shares this, but they really just break down in a very visceral way talking about how they couldn’t remember the sound of a parent’s voice, and it was such a moving episode. Some listeners may, if you’ve been listening for a little bit. Back on episode 462, I had my mom on the podcast, and I read her a column I wrote about teaching lessons I learned from mom. I only get slightly choked up in that episode, but I literally didn’t think I could do it.

I just feel so good now to have overcome my fear of the ugly cry on the podcast. Kind of that idea, we made it through. I have done the ugly cry on the podcast by the way, Tim. I didn’t on that one, and it just the– It’s a beautiful episode. Even if you think why would I want to cry so hard over something, it is a very raw real conversation between two men but it’s just such a powerful example of naming. To me I feel like we don’t get to heal from so many things in life if we can’t name things, and learn how to do that well, in healthy and whole ways. It’s just a beautiful conversation I would really recommend, and I can’t wait. By the way, Tim, I don’t recommend things, just like you only lie on when you’re not, wait you don’t lie on when you’re on podcast.

[00:35:21] Timothy: Let me just be clear here here your audience. I like to think of myself as a genuinely decent person.

[00:35:28] Bonni: Good, good to know.

[00:35:29] Timothy: If we cross paths, I will most likely be truthful with you. I just want to [crosstalk]

[00:35:34] Bonni: It’s so good to know. I cannot wait to read your book and books. The one specifically I’m really excited about is the Deliberative Pedagogy one, because you’ve shared about how it crosses so many disciplines. That’s the one I’m most looking forward to reading first, but I don’t recommend things if I haven’t read them yet. I am going to officially also recommend that people go, look at your website, watch some of the webinars that you’ve done, and the people that you’re connected with.

This is just a wonderful body of work that speaking of healing. I think can be healing for those people listening in the United States, boy does our nation ever need healing of these kinds of things that these tools and approaches could help us all learn how to be better engaged with one another. I look forward to in a future episode, getting the chance to read and recommend. Now, Tim, I want to pass it over to you for whatever you’d to recommend today.

[00:36:28] Timothy: Yes, can I do a quick response to that before [crosstalk]

[00:36:30] Bonni: Oh no, of course, yes, absolutely.

[00:36:32] Timothy: Okay, you’re not too rigid [crosstalk] that’s good.

[00:36:34] Bonni: No, no, there are no rules. No rules on teaching them how to read.

[00:36:37] Timothy: Thanks for your graciousness. I appreciate it. What you just said at the very end actually I feel like it’s something worth stating again more explicitly, is that I don’t do any of this work alone. We’ve got a community, an intellectual community of people who are really committed to this in their individual work in their classrooms. Some of them are stepping into roles, helping to lead various organizations that are part of this network of bridging organizations right now as a lot of the language that gets used.

Part of why the language of deliberative pedagogy even came to be, was we were all sitting around, we were all going to just do our own articles and submit to different journals, and we’re like how do we help make a case to our department heads, and deans, and others as some of us were junior faculty, of how how do we make this argument? We landed on this language, that I think has given a lot of us a reference point to doing some of this work. I will say the creating space for democracy book that falls up as a compliment to that book.

It’s a primer on dialogue and deliberation in higher ed, is really quite similar too. A lot of these cases, different disciplines. I will say that one is about a lot more different process models. The deliberative pedagogy book is very much, a very much deliberation. The other one is very much a broader frame of dialogue and deliberation. Just to say it, but being part of a community I think to me is really important that most of the things I do are collaborative.

There’s only some of my scholarly work that’s Timothy J Shaffer, and most of it’s that name and a bunch of other folks. I guess the thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about, and maybe it’s because I’m doing a revision of a book chapter, and you were just using this language around peace, and there’s a bunch of conversations lately that have been framed around that. I’m doing some fascinating work back in my alma mater. If I can do two things here this would be great.

[00:38:34] Bonni: Yes, no rules.

[00:38:36] Timothy: I love it. This is great. I guess I could probably just do it anyway and you have to begrudgingly accept it, but so I’m glad you’re appreciating it.

[00:38:43] Bonni: It’s really Andrew the podcast editor who’s in control of all of us at this point. [laughs]

[00:38:46] Timothy: Oh okay, okay. Well, so if you actually hear this you know that Andrew has been accepting.

[00:38:51] Bonni: We love you, Andrew.

[00:38:52] Timothy: [crosstalk] wonderful editing skills. I did my undergrad at St. Bonaventure University, a small liberal arts college and a Franciscan school but it’s the home of a poet by the name of Robert Lax. He in the early 20th century, there was this cottage out in the woods that Thomas Martin who was this monastic writer who wrote about war and things in the middle of the 20th century, that they’re trying to reclaim this cottage for civil discourse. I’ve got involved in these conversations, so I’ve been thinking a lot about peace because they were both really strong advocates for this work.

I’m revising this chapter around peace and dialogue. It really got me thinking about how do we think about this in a way that is about the person, but it’s also about the way that we exist in the world. The line that I use all the time is how do we live well with one another? We can take that in a lot of big ways. I would point as a recommendation, one of the wonderful mentors that I’ve benefited so much from in the professional walk but also personal in a ways.

He passed away just a few years ago, but his name was Harold Saunders. He helped develop actually the sustained dialogue model. He has this beautiful line in a book that he published in the late ’90s, 1999 I believe, called A Public Peace Process. He has this line in there, and you could probably find it. I’m going to say a phrase and you could probably do a quick Google and it’s the sort of thing that I used to have tacked up on my office door, but I think it’s so beautiful and such a powerful reminder of how to think about this. My recommendation would be to check out Harold Saunders, A Public Peace Process.

The line is this, “Dialogue is a process of genuine interaction through which human beings listen to each other deeply enough to be changed by what they learn. Each makes a serious effort to take others’ concerns into her or his own picture, even when disagreement persists. No participant gives up her or his identity, but each recognizes enough of the other’s valid human claims that he or she will act differently toward the other.” As I think about that sense of that willingness to listen, it’s not about changing your mind or being compelled to do so but creating a space to have some degree of intellectual humility and to recognize that you might know a whole lot, you might have a bunch of technical knowledge, especially for academics, we feel pretty confident in those things, yet still, what do we not know?

Where does something like dialogue afford us an opportunity? It might come from students in a first-semester class, or it might come from the grandma who walks into some community conversation and you’re looking at them and saying, “What the hell are you doing here?” You realize they got a lot to say and it’s pretty important, and you might want to listen. Listening deeply enough to be changed by what you learn is a hugely important practice.

[00:41:59] Bonni: Tim, it is absolutely fabulous to have been connected with you for this conversation. We’re going to be doing a lot of talking, even if it’s just one way, [laughs] because I have so much that I want to continue to learn from you and your collaborators. Thank you so much for your generosity in coming on the show today.

[00:42:15] Timothy: It’s been a wonderful opportunity. Thank you so much.

[music]

[00:42:20] Bonni: Thank you once again to Timothy J Shaffer for joining me on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroege, who always keeps us guessing in terms of what stays and what goes and does such an exceptional job. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith. Thanks to you so much for listening. If you’ve yet to sign up for the weekly emails, you’ll get an update with all the show notes from the most recent podcast episode.

This one with Tim is going to be amazing. You got to go over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe, and you’ll receive an email once a week with the show notes and other resources that don’t show up on the podcast. Thank you so much for being a part of the Teaching in Higher ED community, and I’ll see you next time.

[00:43:20] [END OF AUDIO]

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.