Goldberg 1 Jonathan Goldberg CAS 138T, Section 002 Robin Kramer March 3, 2014 Deliberation Reflection According to John

Gastil, the author of the chapter on the act of deliberating, democracy and deliberation have a clear connection. As democratic governments became more prevalent, deliberations grew in importance, since they not only gave open forums for everyday citizens to voice their opinions, but also provided a way for leaders to synthesize these thoughts into a meaningful conglomeration of beliefs that could actually make an impact on the way they run the government. Thus, Gastil claims that deliberation should be a pivotal part of our democratic society, as its roots are deeply connected with the foundation of democracy. With this viewpoint, what we practiced in class was incredibly important, as it taught us how to be informed, and impactful everyday citizens. Although I believe the class executed a few elements of the deliberation decently, such as the framing of personal values, the day-to-day deliberation and overall result of the process was inefficient and needed to be improved. With any issue, most people already have a stance that is formed by their personal beliefs and experiences. It is vital in a deliberation to discuss these underlying values, which we did on the first day. I think we made an adequate attempt to recognize and put forth all of the experiences that determined how people feel on the issue of education, but I also believe that we could have analyzed the impact of these experiences a bit further. Since we were

Goldberg 2 required to bring in a prewritten paragraph on our educational background and experiences and recount them to the class, I had a solid knowledge base on how everyone in the class formed their beliefs. For instance, when someone would defend a stance such as loans and federally subsidized grants to low-income individuals, but did not give any factual basis for their argument, I could usually remember their background and understand why they would defend such a viewpoint. In that specific case, I would remember that that person is likely a first or second-generation college student and knows how much of a financial burden college could be for low-income individuals. Unfortunately, this reliance on previously stated personal values deterred from the legitimacy of most of the points my classmates and I stated throughout the deliberation. It could be assumed that most of the stances people had during the deliberation were formed from their personal experiences, and herein lies one of the biggest issues that I saw with our deliberation; opinions were seldom backed with actual facts or articles or even analysis of the experiences that lead that person to support his/her viewpoint (I was at fault for this as well). Even though we read our backgrounds on the first day, I felt as if everyone was just stating opinions with no foundation or support throughout the entirety of the deliberation. For example, someone declared that Americans should have access to college for the simple reason that everyone has the rights to follow his/her dreams. That point to me is interesting, but to me, it had no legitimacy, since it was based solely on opinion, and the speaker did not offer any examples of why, from his own experiences or factual examples, that was a valid argument. There could have been a few solutions to this problem.

Goldberg 3 A group requires a strong moderator to draw more meaningful opinions from the participants in the deliberation. Had I moderated, I would have asked how a person came to form his/her stance if it was strong on a surface level but lacked the analytical depth to back it. That way, the deliberation would not be comprised solely of empty opinions (Megan and Alex did great at incorporating articles in their statements, however, which was exactly what I was looking for). Furthermore, I believe the first days moderators should have synthesized our beliefs into an overview of the experiences of the class, so everyone could have a better understanding of how our viewpoints were formed. If these two tasks were performed, I think the points brought up in the deliberation could have had more legitimacy instead of being just empty, non factually grounded opinions. Besides this issue, I was content on the happenings of the deliberation days. The goals of deliberative sessions are to identify a broad range of solutions and weigh the pros, cons and trade-offs among solutions (Gastil 89), and I believe that we adequately accomplished these tasks. On the first day of actual deliberation, we did not have much focus, and refrained from discussing the points brought up in the packet (since the National Issues Forum did all the work of identifying solutions and weighing their pros and cons for us), but after Robin brought up the fact that we should be focusing on these specific points from the packet, we did so really well subsequent days. The opinions of the class on issues such as lowering standards of admission for low income individuals were highly varied which lead to good deliberation, since we definitely dissected most of the pros and cons of the issues. The only improvement I would suggest on this area would be that I wish people would listen to one another more. On many occasions, I felt as if participants would just sit on their point until they had the opportunity to say it, as

Goldberg 4 opposed to having personal responses to the opinions of the other deliberators. For instance, I think Eric had many good points that he wanted to use to draw more meaningful discussion, but instead of listening and responding to him, the people who spoke after him would simply state what they were going to say before Eric even said a word. If participants were to listen to one another more, I think the final analytical goal of deliberation could have been better reached. The result of a deliberation is that participants should have an updated, more informed opinion on the topic at large, and I do not think that this task could be easily accomplished from our in class process. Since many of the contributions made by the participants were not well supported, and everyone did not do a good job of listening to one another, I find it hard to believe that the deliberation had anyone feeling enlightened on the issue of education or considering their own believes in comparison to others. What I gained out of the days spent deliberating was a solid understanding of where everyone stood on the issue, but not a idea of why I should even consider my own beliefs less valid than anyone elses. Thus, the goal of, Update your own opinion in light of what you have learned (Gastil 89), was not satisfied. Another reason for this lack of final understanding was what I perceived as a poorly executed social process. Gastil outlines how the social process of a deliberation should run, and we did not do the best at following his definition. His first point is that speaking roles should be distributed equally, and although I do not think that anyone in particular talked too much, I do think that a few individuals (myself included) could have contributed more. With everyones personal values in mind, I know that all of the members of the deliberation have relevant points to make, but we lost some of this diversity as a result of silent

Goldberg 5 participants. To improve upon this issue, I think the moderator could have directly addressed some of the members who did not often contribute. This act would have been difficult and slightly awkward to enact, but it would have improved that nature and diversity of the opinion pool. Furthermore, the idea of considering each others points was not really achieved, as I previously touched on. Most of the deliberation was spent just stating opinions without specifically addressing one anothers points. Despite these shortcomings, I believe that we did excel in other areas of the social process. Due to the nature of the topic and the composition of the class, both mutual comprehension and respect were easy to come by. The issue of education is not too complex, and since everyone in the room was a college student who had pretty extensive background knowledge of the issue, it was not hard to follow what anyone had to say. Therefore, mutual comprehension was easily reached during the deliberation. Furthermore, I think that everyone in the class respected the intellectual ability of one another, and besides one or two instances when another participant interrupted someone mid-point, the deliberation was held with a tone of respect. In these ways, the communication level was high, and if people would have just listened to one another and contributed with better-supported points, I think that we would have had a much more meaningful and impactful deliberation. Overall, despite a few areas at which we excelled, there were many ways on which we could improve that would have lead to the overarching goals of the deliberation being precisely met. For example, had participants more clearly backed their opinions with their experiences and factual evidence that lead them to their belief, their statements would have been drastically more impactful. Furthermore, members of the group needed

Goldberg 6 to listen to one another and specifically address the points made by others, as opposed to just waiting for an opportunity to state a pre-concocted statement of belief. These two issues, along with the fact that not everyone equally participated, lead to the clear goal of the deliberation, which was to reimagine an opinion on the issue with the well-supported and diverse points of the masses considered, not being accomplished. Therefore, despite some positive actions that occurred during the deliberation, the in-class deliberation on education reform was not a success.