The discussion revolved around Chapter 4— “Dialogue, Politics, and Pedagogy: Lessons from Democracy Lab”  by James T. Knauer

This chapter focuses on:  1) the purpose of education, 2) the nature of learning, and 3) “dialogue” as a teaching strategy. Knauer says that the classroom is a political space where dialogic strategies have political value. In this classroom, honors students have powerful learning experiences throughg a particular kind of movement: that which is visible, organized, and committted.  What the essay seems to ultimately focus on is: democratization in the classroom through dialogic strategies. Knauer states, “Learning skills of democratic discourse and developing a taste for commitment to deliberation about the common good requires development beyond epistemologically inhibiting assumptions of dualism” (44).  The author provides an exhaustive conversation on what creates democratic educational spaces through dialogic strategies: team work/collaborative learning, student-to-student dialogue, teacher-directed Socratic dialogue/student at the center, the elimination of lecture and passive note-taking, personal experiences and concerns (not narrow cognitive understanding of learning), connecting thinking and feeling, etc. (Read the essay for a comprehensive discussion.) “City as text” projects (see Bernice Braid’s work), for example, can produce what Knauer is talking about. What matters is what interests participants in an educational setting, not what “causes political polarization and alienation”  (Wells 1999, qtd. in Knauer, ix). Dialogic learning, according to Knauer,  supports a co-construction of knowledge, a kind of “empathic thinking” which requires a willingness to suspend disbelief in order to “understand truly.” At the heart of this education is Liberal Learning.

The FIG Group discussed the following:

Questions:

• Is all pedagogy political?
• If so, then what we choose to teach and assign must be political?
• Are all spaces political?
• Is anything neutral in the classroom?

Comments:

• We have to learn how to listen to students.
• To change one’s mind and to have divirse views is valuable.
• Thinking from multiple perspectives should be encouraged.
• Feeling is important to thinking.
• A democracy lab means the development of community, even if it’s ‘messy’.
• Honors students have ability but not always confidence.
• We need to help honors students (all students) voice themselves
• It is important to empower students to stop thinking about being sure or right.

**Session 3 will deal with the rest of Chapter 4—the actual strategies for encouraging/actualizing a democracy lab.—and Chapter 5.

See “All Posts” for Session 3

• Isn’t what we leave out of a course as telling as what we include?