Talking it out, deliberative dialogue in higher education: Compact Nation Podcast

I had the opportunity to be interviewed about my teaching and research with colleagues at Campus Compact as part of #CompactNationPod. Listen below.

Talking it out, deliberative dialogue in higher education

 In our eighth episode of the second season, Co-Hosts Emily Shields and Andrew Seligsohn sat down with author and scholar Timothy Shaffer about his work and research in deliberative dialogue, including his new book “Deliberative Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning for Democratic Engagement.” We discussed what it really takes to embed dialogue in campus and community work and some ideas for making it more effective. We also took a detour from the usual pop culture conversation to review Thanksgiving traditions, including Andrew’s recipe for turkey that doesn’t suck. Listen now and weigh in online using #CompactNationPod.
 

"He was a Democrat and I was a Republican so we didn’t have too much to talk about.”

The Belleville-News Democrat, the local paper from the community in which James T. Hodgkinson lived, provides a perspective that I think we need to attend to in the midst of this highly publicized act of violence towards members of Congress and their staff with a gun.

The paper quotes a neighbor of Hodgkinson:

Aaron Meurer is a neighbor of the Hodgkinsons and said he noticed in the last two months James had been gone. The alleged shooter’s wife Suzanne told him her husband was travelling. 

“She said that he went on a trip. She wasn’t real specific,” said Meurer, unclear whether the couple had split up recently.”He’s been gone for the last two months, so I haven’t seen him around too often.” 

Meurer said he occasionally cut his neighbor’s grass to help out. He didn’t know the neighbors well, just socialized from the lawn, and said his neighbor would fire guns on his rural property, commonplace in the open area outside of Belleville. 

“I knew he was a Democrat, a pretty hardcore one. I know he wasn’t happy when Trump got elected but he seemed like a nice enough guy,” recalled Meurer, who said the couple lived across the street for about six years. 

“He seemed like he was sem-retired, he was home a lot. He used to garden a couple of years ago,”said Meurer, who runs his own trimming and removal service. “I didn’t really talk to him too much. He was a Democrat and I was a Republican so we didn’t have too much to talk about.” 

Meurer said during the campaign Hodgkinson had a lone Bernie Sanders sign near the road in his front yard. He thought that Hodgkinson had raised foster kids who had grown up. He also thought there were grandchildren who visited occasionally. 

“We were neighbors but we didn’t talk every day. When we saw them in the yard we’d say 'hi' and go on our way,” said Meurer. “He seemed like a normal guy, a regular guy.” 

Meurer suggested that perhaps “this Democratic rhetoric made him snap. I know he was a pretty hardcore Democrat.”

What is most concerning to me right now, aside from the vast availability of high capacity firearms and this being the 154th mass shooting in 165 days, is the rhetoric we use to speak of our fellow citizens and how we identify so strongly with/against political parties. As Meurer said, “I didn’t really talk to him too much. He was a Democrat and I was a Republican so we didn’t have too much to talk about.” Have we come to a point that we can't share our humanity with someone if they don't share our political affiliation? Disagree passionately. Debate policies. And consider that your view might not be as airtight as you maybe thought. When we demonize the other, we create a space that, with the wrong ingredients, makes members of Congress become targets rather than fellow citizens with differing views.

Art from my mother's college days hanging in my home office. 

The National Institute for Civil Discourse is leading the Revive Civility and Respect campaign and it seems we need to figure out how to engage one another about the significant issues and challenges we face--even when we disagree deeply. We can do this locally. Here in Kansas we organized Kitchen Table Conversations about what it means to be a citizens and a member of a community. A dear friend and colleague in Kentucky inspired me to do this. The point is, we need to be able to talk with neighbors, colleagues, and coworkers about the issues that matter to us. Retreating into enclaves or disconnecting all together can lead people to take detrimental and sometimes deadly action. 

I'm sure I share many of Hodkinsons' frustrations with the current administration, but I know that actions like today only hurt us, not help. After listening to the Speaker of the House and Minority Leader today speak about the day's events, I would love to see a bit of a reset in how we approach our national politics. A serious challenge is that we have made everything partisan. Republican Senate leadership left a seat vacant on the Supreme Court because of partisan politics. We are on the verge of having millions lose health coverage, in part, because the oft-demonized President Obama's name is connected with the otherwise conservative healthcare model we have in the United States. We need better ways to engage, disagree, and deliberate. 

People across the country and the world are watching and listening, taking in the rhetoric and being shaped by the discourse that immerses them. We can do better. We must. We need to have things to talk about with neighbors regardless of which box they marked at the last election.

Seeing beyond categories #OpenYourWorld

It's an ad. They want to sell you beer. But it also speaks to the importance of engaging with others as people. We have differences. Sometimes rather significantly. But it helps to be able to recognize and respect the other as much as possible so we can work through those differences.

Words v. Videos and Images

What is the internet? A short answer might be: "everything!"

But as I intentionally try to step back from Facebook and Twitter as outlets for simply sharing links to articles that I've read or find interesting, I'm struck by the challenge to do so. I am a little more selective in sharing articles of interest and relevance to contemporary conversations, but it's addictive to stay in the game. This is where everyone is and social media seems to be the platform of choice for a variety of reasons.

What really got me thinking about this was an article in the MIT Technology Review by Hossein Derakhshan. Building on a recent post and the challenge of seeing the world through not only one's preferred and often myopic worldview, the point Derakhshan makes is that social media has become more like watching TV rather than reading a magazine or essay. It seems we've all been taken by the visual and entertaining nature and allure of GIFs, videos from last night's late night entertainers, and data visualization.

This brings me back to Derakhshan. He writes:

If I say that social media aided Donald Trump’s election, you might think of fake news on Facebook. But even if Facebook fixes the algorithms that elevate phony stories, there’s something else going on: social media represents the ultimate ascendance of television over other media. 

I've been warning about this since November 2014, when I was freed from six years of incarceration in Tehran, a punishment I received for my online activism in Iran. Before I went to prison, I blogged frequently on what I now call the open Web: it was decentralized, text-centered, and abundant with hyperlinks to source material and rich background. It nurtured varying opinions. It was related to the world of books. 

Then for six years I got disconnected; when I left prison and came back online, I was confronted by a brave new world. Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogging and had made the Internet like TV: centralized and image-centered, with content embedded in pictures, without links.

I can recall my experience of the internet before Facebook existed, particularly as it related to newsworthy issues. Pre-Facebook and News Feeds, we had AOL Instant Messenger for chatting back and forth within our dorms and with people far and wide. That's not all that different from the ease of Facebook Messenger today, but those conversations were not embedded within an experience of a News Feed and knowing what that other person was looking at, "liking," and commenting on. If I was chatting on AIM, I was communicating with you without knowing what you were looking at on your equally clunky Dell, HP, or Compaq desktop computer. There was a degree of privacy and autonomy that has largely disappeared. To know what you thought about social issues required me to know you, to talk with you. If I interact with someone on Facebook or follow them on Twitter, it is nearly impossible not to know their political views and some of the more intimate elements of their lives simply because social media encourages (pushes) us to share and consume constantly.


My consumption of news during that earlier phase of life was distinctly different. I went directly to the New York Times and (the then) MSNBC. To read news stories I had to find news stories. Now it comes to me in an endless stream.

I've always appreciated long-form journalism and the depth that comes from such work. As we collectively continue to embrace quick and immediately consumable media, I remain committed to--ideally, even more so now--to the written word with depth, substance, and necessary complexity, rather than the more consumable, shareable, simple, and often wrong answers to our most pressing problems. This also points to the importance of talking about these complex issues with people, ideally with differing and competing understandings and interpretations. One of biggest concerns is that we don't have many of these spaces, whether in real life or on a platform such as Facebook. How do we have conversations that are substantive and not simply combative? That's a question I struggle to answer.