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DOI

10.21768/ejopa.v5i2.6

Abstract

A focus on public dialogue and deliberation is critical for civic engagement programs in higher education because such skills provide students with the knowledge necessary for addressing wicked problems in American democracy. Throughout the 2014-2015 academic year, the Center for Public Deliberation (CPD) at the University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) partnered with the Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) at Lone Star College-Kingwood (LSC-Kingwood) in carrying out a series of community deliberative dialogues in order to capitalize on the city of Houston’s Citizenship Month and provide a shared civic experience for students. This article describes a study in which the authors performed a qualitative analysis of student responses to four open-ended questions administered at four of these deliberative forum events—two focusing on the mission of higher education, one on energy, and one on guns on campus. The analysis revealed that the forums influenced and changed the ways in which students had previously experienced or talked about politics. The results suggest that academic institutions must think more purposefully about how they embed these types of opportunities into their civic curricula across the span of students’ education, allowing students to develop the skills needed to construct a different type of politics for addressing wicked problems in an effective and productive manner.

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