Gender (non)Conformity

Not long ago, someone told me that she was still learning to be a woman. This person was over the age of 15, so it struck me as a particularly interesting comment.

Actually, it reminded me that when I was about 15 I’d told someone that I wasn’t very good at being a girl.

“What does that even mean?” they’d appropriately responded.

It also reminded me that in my early 20s I went out and bought a bunch of “sweaters with weird necks” (I now know them as “cowl necks”) because, “that’s what women wear.”

To be fair, there was an element of class identity to that last one, as I struggled to fit into my first office setting. But still, that feeling of gender identity was there.

And it was interesting that we’d both had this experience of having to “learn” to be our gender.

Of course, our experiences have been different – I am a cisgendered woman (unless I lose points for being “bad” at it), and the person I was talking to is a transgendered woman.

I certainly don’t mean to claim understanding or familiarity with another’s experience, but I’m honestly not sure why either of us need to “learn” to be like our gender.

Yet somehow it seems reasonable to imagine a transgendered woman saying she needs to learn to be a woman, even as it sounds absurd to hear a cisgendered woman say so.

I wondered if anyone had ever questioned her comment they way someone had once questioned mine.

No, but seriously – what does that even mean?

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On Minority Genius in Philosophy

Is this what genius looks like?

There’s a lot of reasons to worry about “genius” and other evaluations of general intelligence. My own character skepticism militates against the notion of measurable general intelligence, or even field-specific genius. But the report last month that women and racial minorities in the humanities are less likely to be described as geniuses is another such reason: it looks like genius is often merely a way of saying “white male.” Thus perhaps we should give up on genius and cultivate other virtues, especially if we want to create diverse faculty communities.

And yet.

My experience in philosophy has usually been the opposite: women and African-American philosophers have usually struck me as brighter, more insightful, and making a greater contribution to the discipline than their male and white colleagues (including of course myself.) I wrote my dissertation on a woman, Hannah Arendt. I’m frequently struck by the amazing work done by women and Black philosophers like Elizabeth Anderson, Angela Davis, Christine Korsgaard, Elizabeth Anscombe, Kristie Dotson, Karen Stohr, Chris Lebron, Shannon Sullivan, Sharon Meagher, Charles Mills, Noëlle McAfee, Anthony Appiah, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Tommie Shelby, Rebecca Kukla, Elinor Ostrom, and Jacqueline Scott.

And so I wonder if the error is the language and preference for genius or our poor ability to recognize it. That is: is the problem that philosophers and folks in the humanities think that genius exists, and it doesn’t? Or is the problem that philosophers and folks in the humanities think that they can detect genius, and they can’t?

There’s a plausible explanation of the feeling I have of being awed by women and Black philosophers, of course: in a field that values genius but has a bias against believing in the genius of women and Black philosophers, the only women and Black philosophers who survive the gauntlet of graduate school and job market will be those who can project that genius. They’ll be exceptions that prove the rule, tokens that demonstrate that the whole business of evaluating genius can’t be flawed because, after all, we recognized the greatness of these few scholars.

Moreover, the failure of all the mediocre and merely above-average women and Black philosophers will go unmentioned. We’ll rarely ask: why is it that almost every minority scholar is a genius? Why are all the merely-really-good and maybe-slightly-below-average scholars white and male? One possibility is that genius (of the particular sort preferred by humanities scholars) is unevenly distributed to non-white and non-male scholars: they bring a perspective that comes naturally to them (by virtue of their exclusion from the majority) that makes it especially easy to make outsized contributons. Another possibility is that average scholars are ignored when they are women or Black. What’s more, both of these explanations could hold for part of the injustice we observe: we might need to start talking about the comparative effect size of each of these explanations and not an exclusive disjunction between them.

There’s been a lot of work, lately, chipping away at the sense that the university is meritocratic. Far fewer are working on whether merit is even a meaningful characteristic to evaluate. That still seems like an important question to ask, an insightful and bright question. But I’d also like to see more people take genius as a possibility, to be “genius realists” and question whether the current crop of white, male elites just don’t have it or the ability to recognize it. I am suspicious of the effort to withdraw the merit that accrues to great philosophical scholarship just as women and Black philosophers are eligible to claim it in larger numbers. (The solution to unjust distributions of the pie is not always to throw out the pie.)

Perhaps we shouldn’t give up on genius just yet: perhaps we just need to accept that we’re not smart enough to recognize it when we see it. And perhaps, too, we can give up on the innateness of genius in favor of an account of intelligence as plasticity, as the result of environment and treatment: perhaps philosophical geniuses are not born, but trained and prepared.

On Evaluation and Legitimacy in D&D

Our partners at the Kettering Foundation recently published an insightful interview with Prof. Katie Knobloch of the Center for Public Deliberation – an NCDD organizational member – that we wanted to share here. There’s a lot to learn from Katie’s reflection on the challenges of evaluating and legitimizing D&D work, so we encourage you to read the interview below or find the original piece here.


Does Our Work Really Matter? Deliberative Practitioners Reflect on the Impact of Their Work

kfAs attention to public deliberation has increased, one core interest of researchers has been evaluating the impact of deliberative processes. Researchers, practitioners, elected officials, and participants themselves want to know if what they’re doing matters. Does public deliberation impact policy? Does it change our attitude toward issues? Does it adhere to democratic ideals?

Professor Katherine R. Knobloch has been intimately involved in evaluation work, refining our understanding of these questions. Former research assistant Jack Becker sat down with her to talk about her work around evaluation, as well as her work with the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review.

Katherine R. Knobloch is an assistant professor and the associate director of the Center for Public Deliberation in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. Her research and teaching focus on political communication and civic engagement, specifically exploring how deliberative public processes can create a more informed and engaged citizenry. For this work, she has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the expansion of a new governing institution, the Citizens’ Initiative Review. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Applied Communication Research, Politics, and the International Journal of Communication.

Jack Becker: Your work explores the development, evaluation, and impact of deliberative public processes. How do you compartmentalize each of these in your research?

Katherine R. Knobloch: The central element of interest is figuring out how to implement deliberative practices in ways that matter. To look at the development of public deliberation, I talk with people about what goes into running organizations, how they work with public officials to implement their processes, and how they got involved in public deliberation. I do a lot of fieldwork and observations to examine this.

For evaluation, I have worked alongside a number of scholars to develop a coding scheme that allows us to break the deliberative process out into segments. We then use that scheme to judge the deliberations against goals that practitioners identified and goals and definitions that we as researchers have developed to analyze if processes are fulfilling democratic and deliberative standards.

For example, we have used an updated definition from John Gastil’s Political Communication and Deliberation (2008), that deliberation is an analytic information gathering process, a democratic discussion process, and a decision-making process. I will also spend time observing participants and getting feedback from them directly, asking, for example, did they reach their goals? Did they uphold deliberative criteria? I will also do a pre- and post-survey of participants to examine a variety of factors, such as attitudinal changes.

To look at impact, with the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) process, for example, we are looking at whether the process has an impact in how voters make their decisions. Do people read the CIR statement? Do they find the information valuable?

You have a chapter in Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement (2012) in which you and your coauthors lay out criteria for evaluating deliberative public processes. What is it we learn from evaluating deliberation, and what are our challenges?

I think we’re looking to refine our methods. I’m concerned that we do evaluation in an inefficient way. Much of my own work in evaluating deliberation relies on grants, and that’s not sustainable, particularly for small organizations that lack the capacity to get large grants and do the evaluative work. So we need to figure out what survey methods are best and how they can be refined to make it easier for practitioners to regularly evaluate their work.

For the CIR, we wanted to start a coding scheme that would be applicable across deliberative events. Deliberative processes are dynamic, and that’s another challenge to the work of evaluation. During deliberative processes, the agenda may change in real time, and in the past, we’ve changed coding schemes, but now we’re trying to use the same coding scheme and develop one that will work in other deliberative processes. The goal of evaluation is to be able to look back and say what the most valuable results from a process are.

Are we seeing more practitioners evaluate their own work?

I think that’s been a trend in recent years. More people want to know if their work is doing what they say it’s doing. Also, they want to know if it is effective in impacting communities, organizations, and people.

I attended a session at the National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation this year that was focused on practitioners and academics getting on the same page with evaluation. One of the challenges is that everyone is working off of different frameworks. Josh Lerner with Participatory Budgeting (PB) pointed out at the conference how many different teams are evaluating PB processes. So they are trying to create at least a funnel point to gather this info and synthesize this.

I’ve been talking about civic infrastructure with people for the past year. How do innovations such as the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) fit into ideas of civic infrastructure?

One of the most important breakthroughs for the CIR in Oregon is that it is a legitimate and formal part of the governing process. I think effective public engagement matters. It’s important for participants to come away from deliberative processes feeling like their participation was purposeful and that it could have a real impact on public decision making. I think that’s the legitimizing part of the CIR. It legitimizes deliberation as part of governance. Ideally, we would like to see more processes like these become embedded in government as ways to improve the quality of our civic infrastructure.

Organizations, practitioners, and theorizers are taking this process seriously. As a field, deliberation faces the challenge of implementing decisions that publics make at deliberative events. So people make decisions through deliberative processes, but then decision makers decide whether to use it. So the CIR specifically addresses that problem, in that recommendations go right to voters in the voters guide for their consideration. The CIR finds a way to make those decisions matter at the policymaking level.

Participatory Budgeting is a wonderful example of making things matter for people as well. City councils and city governments are handing over portions of their budget to citizen decision making, showing that citizens have the capacity to make these decisions.

So part of the success I hear there is that they are creating connections to the decision-making process by working with decision makers. Are elected and appointed officials into this?

I think there are more city officials who are into deliberation. It may be wishful thinking, but I see city officials taking citizen voice more seriously. I think they want to understand what citizens want and why. Even President Obama making the call for a discussion on mental health is a good example. And models like the Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation are great examples of linking deliberative practice more directly with city officials and providing recommendations to city councils in ways that are impactful.

Hawaii state senator Les Ihara Jr. stressed to me in a recent interview the importance of meeting elected officials where they are. Does this resonate as a productive approach to growing deliberative practice?

Legislators are often wary of the initiative process since the policy or legislation is created without a connection to the resources allocation process. So it creates a misalignment in the policymaking process. Legislators are open to how to improve the initiative process. And so in Oregon, officials were interested in how to improve that process and saw that the CIR could potentially bring more alignment to the initiative process.

So in developing the Citizens’ Initiative Review, to what extent was the process driven by government officials in demanding these changes?

It was really driven by the founders of the CIR who were not a part of government. When they first proposed the CIR, they had a conversation with the Oregon Secretary of State who asked them to run a pilot. The founders of the process drove it. But they worked closely alongside legislators and public officials to identify what they thought would be useful to improve the process and to make sure it met the needs for Oregon as a whole. And the legislators of Oregon asked for a thorough evaluation of the process during the pilot, exploratory phase. So it really comes back to the importance of evaluation in growing deliberative practice.

The original version of this Kettering Foundation interview can be found at http://kettering.org/kfnews/does-our-work-matter.

apply for the 2015 Summer Institute of Civic Studies

The seventh annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies will be an intensive, two-week, interdisciplinary seminar bringing together faculty, advanced graduate students, and practitioners from many countries and diverse fields of study.

Organized by Peter Levine of Tufts University’s Tisch College and Karol Soltan of the University of Maryland, the Summer Institute will engage participants in challenging discussions of such topics as:

  • What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need?
  • What should such citizens know, believe, and do?
  • What practices and institutional structures promote the right kinds of citizenship
  • What ought to be the relationships among empirical evidence, ethics, and strategy?

The syllabus for the sixth annual seminar (in 2014) is here. The 2015 syllabus will be modified but will largely follow this outline. You can read more about the motivation for the Institute in the Framing Statement by Harry Boyte, University of Minnesota; Stephen Elkin, University of Maryland; Peter Levine, Tufts; Jane Mansbridge, Harvard; Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University; Karol Soltan, University of Maryland; and Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania.

Practicalities

The daily sessions will take place from June 15-25, 2015, at the Tufts campus in Medford, MA. The seminar will be followed (from June 24, evening, until June 27) by a public conference–“Frontiers of Democracy 2015”–in downtown Boston. Participants in the institute are expected to stay for the public conference. See information on the 2014 conference here.

Tuition for the Institute is free, but students are responsible for their own housing and transportation. A Tufts University dormitory room can be rented for $230-$280/week. Credit is not automatically offered, but special arrangements for graduate credit may be possible.

To apply: please email your resume, an electronic copy of your graduate transcript (if applicable), and a cover email about your interests to Peter Levine at Peter.Levine@Tufts.edu. For best consideration, apply no later than March 15, 2012. You may also sign up for occasional announcements even if you are not sure that you wish to apply.

The Sister Seminar in Ukraine

In 2015, there will also be a parallel Summer Institute at Chernivitsi University in Ukraine. It is co-organized by Dr. Tetyana Kloubert (University of Augsburg) with Karol Soltan and Peter Levine and funded by the German government through the DAAD. Participants from Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Germany are eligible. More information here.

Please feel free to share this announcement.

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Challenges of Educational Games

I just got back from a great weekend of gaming at Dreamation, and it got me thinking – just what is it that makes a game fun?

I find this question particularly relevant because, while educational games are on the rise, games designed with the primary intention of transmitting information are notoriously terrible. “Gamification” may be all the rage, but what’s the point of an educational game if the resulting game is neither educational nor enjoyable?

Of course, my biggest qualm with “gamification” is the implied disparagement – wouldn’t it be great if we could use games for something valuable? – the concept seems to say.

But, in fact, games have inherent value. Many games are educational. They can teach skills, values, knowledge. They can ask important questions and help us collectively explore possible answers.

I mean, sure, there are plenty of poorly designed, not particularly valuable games out there – but those games are the exception, not the norm.

But even finding inherent value in games, it can still be fun to ask, how can I build a game that explores a given issue? How can people learn about a given topic from a game?

The two are not mutually exclusive.

I think the challenge of educational games is that they tend to be too focused on the education and too weary of the game. A textbook turned into a game is still inherently a textbook. The gamification may make it less dry…but it’s not really a game.

But a game tackling a topic – now that can be fun.

In one game this weekend, I learned about the lives of hobos in the early 20th century. It wasn’t the primary purpose of the game to teach me, but it was a natural piece of the game’s existence.

In most of the games I played, we explored questions of power and privilege, of gender norms and social justice, of humanity and inhumanity.

These weren’t educational topics dressed up as games, but rather wholly quintessential games placed in a time and context which gave them life, form, and meaning.

There are many types of games and many types of fun, but when it comes to so-called educational games, I guess –

A fun game is one that asks you questions, not one which gives you answers.

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PCP Launches “A Better Question” Series on Hot Topics

Recently there has been a lot of talk on our NCDD discussion listserv about how to have good conversations around the current vaccine debate, and so we wanted to share this timely piece from our friends with the Public Conversations Project. PCP is launching a new blog series aimed at helping folks have better conversations on controversial topics called “A Better Question,” and they dealt with vaccinations as their first subject.

We encourage you to read their piece below or find the original on the PCP blog by clicking here.


PCP new logoA Better Question: Vaccinations

For the past 25 years, Public Conversations Project has been helping people navigate deep differences in identity. It is understandable when people reach out to ask us to comment on a current crisis in our world. How can communities like Ferguson, Missouri resolve the tension tearing them apart? What can dialogue do for the people of Paris after the latest shootings? How do we resolve our differences about same-sex marriage?

We don’t know. Public Conversations Project doesn’t presume to know what any community should or shouldn’t do without the deep preparation, collaboration, and local awareness that has made our work effective for so long. So, what can we offer the conversation about these highly visible, hotly contested issues without being prescriptive?

A better question. A better question than “should we or shouldn’t we?”A better question than “How can you think that way?” A better question than you’d be likely to hear on TV or social media.

We have decided to offer this as a new series on our blog – it will appear from time to time when a polarizing conversation seems like it could benefit from “A Better Question.” The series is meant to inspire people to have a better conversation in their communities, with their friends and family. It is meant to help bring a little more understanding and a little less demonization. We believe the best conversations are the ones that start with questions, and that most conversations are only as good as the question that starts them.

The first entry is a set of questions that relate to the issue of vaccination in children, a hotly debated issue that has come to prominence in recent months since the outbreak of diseases we thought long vanished. The conversation is a difficult one: it’s about our children, our health, and some of our deeply held values. Rather than shaking your head, or your fist, at someone who doesn’t share your view on vaccination, we invite you to start a conversation with some better questions:

  • What are the core values or commitments that frame your views on vaccination?
  • What do you take into account when deciding which information sources you trust about vaccinations?
  • What have you heard said about your views that leaves you feeling mischaracterized?
  • What do you want folks on the other side of this issue to most understand about your thinking and motivations?
  • Where, if at all, do you feel pulled in different directions, have mixed feelings, areas of less certainty, etc.?
  • How have you learned about those whose viewpoints differ from yours? What else might you want to find out about them?
  • What do you think the media, government or others could do to help or hurt this current situation?

What other questions would you add to this list? Let us know and join the conversation.

You can find the original version of this Public Conversations Project blog piece at www.publicconversations.org/blog/better-question-vaccination#sthash.mfovN2Qh.dpuf.

the Florida Civic Advance

(Orlando, FL), I am here for the Florida Civic Advance, a summit of people from across the state who support the civic life of their communities. They are the kinds of people who don’t just attend meetings; they organize and facilitate them. They don’t just vote; they build voter-education programs. They don’t just follow and discuss the news; they report and curate news for their communities.

Overall, the proportions of Americans who say that they have attended community meetings, worked with neighbors to address problems, followed the news, and belonged to organizations have all fallen since the 1970s. Florida scores very low on these indicators, sometimes 49th or 50th out of 50.

To boost these forms of engagement requires investment and support. The Associated Press-GfK recently repeated survey questions they had asked in 1984 about voting, volunteering, serving on a jury, and keeping informed about news and public issues. All of those activities had fallen, with the exception of voting (which fluctuates with the political situation) and volunteering, which has been buoyed by a substantial increase in the youth volunteering rate.

That last trend can be explained by the substantial investment in youth volunteering through high school service-learning programs, AmeriCorps, Campus Compact member colleges, and so on. Proponents of service have won new funding and rewards for volunteering, positive media coverage, intensive research and evaluation, and favorable policies, including mandates in many school districts.

There has been no comparable investment in the other forms of civic engagement.

Who will work to strengthen broader opportunities for civic engagement? Not political elites, who have limited interest in empowering citizens. And not average citizens, who have had too little experience with rewarding civic engagement to understand its value. National polling has found that average Americans are lukewarm about civic engagement, no matter how it is named and described.

Our best allies are the kind of people who are gathering at Florida Civic Advance. They have demonstrated their commitment. They grasp the value of civic engagement. Despite the low average levels of engagement across the state, these leaders are numerous enough to be powerful. But they tend to work on specific projects in specific issues domains within their own geographical communities. They do not coordinate to promote civic renewal. They are not conscious of being part of a movement or nascent movement for democracy.

Gathering such people is the strategy I recommend in the final chapter of We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, so I am very excited to see this summit draw so many committed and creative people and projects.

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Civic Agency and Executive Function: An Emerging Conversation

A conversation is just beginning between practitioners and theorists of civic agency and scholars and educators promoting educational experiences which develop Executive function. It may have large potential.

Civic Agency

Today, most people feel powerless to do much of anything other than complain or protest about public problems from the local traffic sign to racial profiling, from school bullying to global warming. Young people in low income and minority communities especially feel powerless. The work of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, which I founded more than 20 years ago at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute, has sought from the outset to develop theory and practice of effective self-organizing civic action -- what can be called civic agency, or the public work framework of citizenship -- to help overcome the gap between concern and capacity to act.

We began Public Achievement (PA) in 1991 to teach young people the self-organizing approaches to change and the larger view of democracy which I learned as a college student in the civil rights movement. In Public Achievement, teams of young people work on issues of their choice in real world settings, schools or communities. They meet through the year, coached by adults, often college students, who help them develop achievable goals, learn to navigate their local environment, and learn everyday political skills and political concepts. Public Achievement is an example of what is called "civic studies," an interdisciplinary action-oriented field focused on agency and citizens as co-creators.

St. Bernard's Elementary School, a Catholic school in a low-income and working class neighborhood in St. Paul, was the early incubator. There, PA became the centerpiece of the school's culture in the early and mid-1990s through the leadership of then principal Dennis Donovan. He wanted young people to learn everyday skills of making change and he saw all forms of work in the school, including teaching, as having potentially public, empowering dimensions. Public Achievement has since spread to several hundred communities and schools in the United States and more than two dozen countries.

At Augsburg College where the Center for Democracy and Citizenship is now merged into the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship, the Special Education pre-service program adapted Public Achievement as a response to the challenge to Special Education emerging within the field, as well from outside critics including parents. Special Education students are often segregated from mainstream students because they are identified with a disability deemed to interfere with educational achievements.

Those placed in Special Education, which include disproportionate numbers of poor and minority children, often suffer lifetimes of trouble with mental illness, unemployment and incarceration.

A growing number of scholars and educators argue that the problem is school culture rather than individual young people. As Susan O'Connor, head of Special Education program at Augsburg puts it, "Special Education still uses a medical model where teachers try to 'fix' kids." The Special Education pre-service program adapted Public Achievement because it wanted to shift to an empowerment model instead.

Three years of testing Public Achievement in Fridley Middle School near Minneapolis produced dramatic results. "Problem" students, mostly low-income and minority, became public leaders on issues like reduction of school bullying, promoting healthy lifestyles, and preventing animal cruelty. They developed working relationships with school administrators, community leaders, elected officials, and gained attention of media like Minnesota Public Radio.

Executive Function

We have begun to think about ways in which civic agency in PA fosters skills of "Executive Function." Executive Function, akin to "self-regulation" or "self-control," is a concept emerging from thousands of studies in brain development. It has been shown to be highly relevant to what makes for young people's academic and social success. Phil Zelazo, a scientist with the Institute for Child Development (ICD) at the University of Minnesota and a pioneer in the field, defines it as "brain processes involved in goal-directed modulation of attention, thought, emotion, motivation and action."

Though connections between Executive Function, civic agency, and democratic society have been rarely made explicit, they are beginning to appear. Zelazo and Stephanie Carlson, another scientist at the ICD, contributed to a White Paper for the launch of a movement called "Civic Science" at the National Science Foundation in October, 2014, based on a view of science as a set of practices and values essential for democratic society like cooperation, free inquiry, and the testing of ideas in practice. At the ICD symposium described in my last blog, Carlson argued that Executive Function is "about democracy," based on choice. It brings back the view of children as agents of their learning. Programs which increase Executive Function "engage students' passionate interests," "cultivate joy, pride, and self-confidence," and "foster social bonding."

Deepening the Connections

Skills of Executive Function clearly overlap with capacities developed through Public Achievement. According to observers, at Fridley PA impacted students' self-image, confidence, sense of agency, pride, and relationships. "They believed that they were more capable than they had ever thought they were in the past," said Alyssa Blood, who wrote her Master's thesis on Public Achievement. "The students believe that they can be positive citizens and that the people who believed differently about them are wrong." Many students express pride and confidence. "I feel more mature and happy," said one. Blood observes that participants "began to express feelings of power beyond the realm of Public Achievement." Another described his feeling that "we can change a lot of things in the world [like] Martin Luther King did."

Students developed civic identities and new habits and skills such as relationship-building, negotiation, compromise, planning, organizing, and public speaking. Public Achievement also developed agency of the teachers, including new relationships with families. Since the success of PA in Fridley Middle School, the Special Education program at Augsburg changed its curriculum so that all pre-service students coach in more than a dozen Public Achievement sites.

Both civic agency and Executive Function educators and scholars are focused on developing the agency of young people and their capacities to shape the world around them.

And both raise basic questions about the pedagogies and purposes of today's education.