Monthly Archives: December 2017

Exciting Updates from the Center for Public Deliberation

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We want to lift up the work going on in our network and the incredible value it brings to improving dialogue and deliberation, public engagement and democracy. To show the value of both the work going on in our field and why we encourage you to support NCDD during our End-of-Year fund drive.

As part of the Fund Drive, we will be sharing the highlights from around the field every week and why we believe in this network’s vital work. That’s why we want to share these exciting updates from our NCDD Board Chair, Martín Carcasson, co-founder and director of the Center for Public Deliberation (CPD) at Colorado State University, and the talented CPD alumni.

Martín gave a “CivicEdTalk” keynote at the 2017 Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement (#CLDE17) meeting that took place in Baltimore, Maryland from June 7-10, 2017. The talk, which you can find here, is a condensed version of his NCDD bootcamp talk that some of you may be familiar with, tailored to the higher ed audience. He talks about how we engage communities to work to address the “wicked problems,” that he describes as “not bad people with wicked values, but the wickedness is in the problem and not the people.” By framing it this way, the situation shifts people from a less adversarial place to a more collaborative one. We recommend you check out his Facebook page called “the Wicked Problems Mindset,” for more information.

Martín has an upcoming online webinar with IAP2 called “Beginning with the Brain in Mind” on how to build public processes by taking human nature into consideration. Learn how to avoid the negative human tendencies like confirmation bias and selection exposure, and instead tap our positive aspects like creativity and empathy. The webinar is on December 12th at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern and you can register for it by clicking here.

We also wanted to share some of the fantastic work his CPD colleagues and alumni have produced…

  • Kalie McMonagle, the new CPD Program Manager, released the report called, “Partnering for Inclusion: Recruitment strategies for deliberative conversations”, which focuses on how cross-sector partners gathered participants to engage in deliberative conversations.
  • Samantha Maldonado released the report, “Inclusion Around the Cycle: Applying strategies of sufficient inclusion throughout the cycle of deliberative inquiry”on being more inclusive before/during/after deliberative events.
  • Leah Sprain, former CPD Associate Director, released the report, “Citizens Speaking as Experts: Expertise discourse in deliberative forums”.

You can keep up with the CPD’s work at their website or on Facebook.

Keep an eye on the blog and NCDD’s social media this month (and always) for more great updates from the dialogue & deliberation field. Don’t forget to help NCDD and our network continue the important work of sharing the stories of the power of D&D, collaborating, and connecting to improve our work, by contributing to the NCDD End-of-Year Fund Drive!

Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and memories of Rust Belt adolescence

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Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw (pictured below) were born in urban Michigan during the 1950s. By the time they were art students in the early 1970s, they’d seen all the stuff you don’t study in a University of Michigan classroom: doodles drawn in ball-point pen on lined paper while the teacher isn’t looking, fundamentalist tracts, album covers, semi-professional local ads, cable-access shows, comics, sci-fi paperbacks, D&D manuals, second-hand children’s book covers, toy packages from the dime store, pinups, and posters for high school plays. They collected that material, imitated it, and mashed it together in their gallery art and for the stage performances of their punk band Destroy All Monsters.

 

Their two-man gallery show, “Michigan Stories: Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw” (MSU Broad Museum), evokes the claustrophobia of adolescence, when you realize that you’re being raised to play a role in a society that you don’t much like. All those adults coming at you to tell you what to believe and do feel like monsters from a late-night horror film. Kelley, who died in 2012, was explicit that his adolescence was miserable.

That wasn’t my life. I was raised in a protective family, encouraged to explore a wide range of paths, and basically in love with the world. Yet I can summon memories of, say, junior high school in Syracuse, NY circa 1980 that powerfully evoke Kelley and Shaw. I was a half-generation younger, so when they were blasting their “noise rock,” I was afraid of big kids like them. But the graphic art and music of their cohort formed the backdrop for us early Gen-Xers.

For me, these guys evoke something more specific than perennial adolescent claustrophobia. They witnessed the particular disappointment of Rust Belt America when manufacturing crashed and the postwar promise turned out to be hollow. Black people and women captured some power in cities like Detroit and Syracuse, and everyone got permission to be a bit more free–just as capital and opportunity drained away. Kelley and Shaw were white boys watching a society that seemed unfair or cruel to others and pretty hollow for people like them. Out of that experience, they made some powerful visual art.

See also: Detroit and the temptation of ruin.

Announcing a New Free Online Course Series from FJCC for New and Beginning Civics Teachers!

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Friends in Civics, we have some exciting news. The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute is now offering a free online Canvas course targeting primarily new and beginning civics teachers, though it is open to any and all civics educators who are interested.

This program will provide educators new to civics with a supported professional
learning experience while teaching middle school civics. They will learn,
implement and reflect on educational best practices, engage with a cohort of
other educators and network with experienced civic education professionals.

For those teachers in Florida seeking points towards certificate renewal, this course series offers that opportunity through the ePDC (electronic Professional Development Connections) system. In the infographic below, you can see the scope and sequence of the course series.

Canvas Course JPG

Beginning in February, we will be launching the first course in the series, A Prepared Classroom. This course was piloted in early fall of 2017, and it was a successful first effort, so we are eager to share it with other teachers!

A Prepared Classroom will focus on understanding the role of course descriptions and the Civics End-of-Course Test Item Specifications, utilizing curriculum and pacing guide resources, strategically planning and preparing for instruction, as well as providing data informed instruction based on formative and summative data. You can view the syllabus for the first course here: FJCC A Prepared Classroom Syllabus (Feb 2018)

Are you more interested in the second, third , or later courses because you feel pretty good about the content in the first one? That is fine! You DO NOT have to take every course; Florida teachers may earn renewal points for EACH course in the series. We will be piloting the second course, A Cognitively Complex Classroom, in early 2018 with a small group of teachers, and will let you know when we launch it after what we hope will be a successful pilot!

Each course in the series will be offered through the free version of the Canvas platform. Canvas Free for Teacher accounts are always free, but they do not contain all features available to institutional users of Canvas. For example, no client support beyond access to the Canvas Guides is offered to you as a Free for Teachers user. With a Canvas Free for Teachers account users can access and participate in courses as well as create (and host) their own online courses. Please note that you WILL have to create a new account to use this version of the platform; it is not compatible with the institutional version you may use in your school or district. You can learn more about this version of the platform here.

In order to enroll in the course, you will need to be sure that you register through the ePDC system. Let’s walk through the process together. First, go to the PAEC website at PAEC.org.
PAEC 1

Once there, click on ePDC and if this is your first time, click on ePDC and then ‘Create an Account.’ Once you confirm your account registration, sign in and then click again on ePDC and select ‘Course Offerings’. You should see a screen like this:

EPDC2

Click on ‘Course Offerings’, and you will see something like this:
PAEC3

 

In the ‘Search Text’ bar, you can type ‘FJCC’, and the course should appear!

FJCC PAEC EPDC

Click on ‘Register’ and you should be in. The ePDC course is setup to automatically direct the person that registers for the course to the Canvas Course page.  You will have to create an account if you do not already have one but the link to the February course is embedded in the ePDC PAEC course.

You can expect a follow up email or two from your course instructor in late December and in January, prior to the start of the course. At this time, registration is limited to the first 25 participants, but it may be possible to make exceptions!

How are in-service points handled?
PAEC extracts in-service records from the ePDC and submits in-service data for member and participating districts to the Florida Department of Education as a service to districts. Teachers from outside of PAEC member or participating districts should print the Certificate of Completion for each course and submit the certificate to the appropriate district professional development office.

We do hope to see you in this online space for learning and the development of a virtual professional learning community. Please share this with anyone you believe might benefit from this course series! 

Questions about this entire course series, or the first course in the series (‘A Prepared Classroom‘), can be directed to Dr. Steve Masyada or Ms. Peggy Renihan.

revisiting the Port Huron Statement’s focus on universities

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(en route to Michigan) The Port Huron Statement (1962) inaugurated the New Left. I had forgotten that it concludes with an argument that universities are the most promising sites of social change. It’s interesting to revisit that argument 55 years later.

The statement is written in opposition to a “dominating complex of corporate, military, and political power.” It defines the Republican/Dixiecrat coalition as “the weakest point” in that complex, vulnerable to political opposition. In our time, someone writing a similarly radical manifesto might target the neoliberal political coalition in Congress, which often includes mainstream Republicans and moderate Democrats. Despite partisan polarization that makes Congress ineffective, this coalition musters majorities for policies that neoliberals like and that radicals oppose.

“But” says the statement, “the civil rights, peace, and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent, to be counted with enthusiasm. From where else can power and vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence.”

This would be like saying in 2017 that #Blacklivesmatter, #Occupy, and the #Dreamers lack the resources to challenge the ruling coalition–and labor is too moderate–so social change should start in universities.

That seems an implausible claim on its face, but the Statement offers reasons:

First, the university is located in a permanent position of social influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for organizing, evaluating and transmitting knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently are used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed [by the way defense contractors and corporations rely on academia for technical research].

The Statement acknowledges the university’s serious limitations but adds even more reasons to focus there:

Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. … A new left must be distributed in significant social roles throughout the country. … A new left must consist of younger people … A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system. … A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond. … A new left must transform modern complexity into issues that can be understood and felt close up by every human being. … The university is a relevant place for all of these activities.

Reflecting on this argument in 2017, I’d propose:

  1. Quite a few people still think this way. In particular, they continue to see social movements, labor, and the universities as the promising sites of radical change, but they believe that the first two are too weak or quiescent. Political parties and campaigns, municipal governments, and working-class cultural movements are resources that seem to be overlooked, then and now.
  2. You don’t have to be paranoid to be concerned about the ideological capture of the university, if you are a conservative. That was an explicit proposal of a hugely influential document in 1962.
  3. Some reasons that the university resists the ideals of the Port Huron Statement are unfortunate: e.g., the influence of Big Money on research. But the university also resists these ideals because of worthy principles: independence, nonpartisanship, and intellectual diversity. (On the other hand, a friendly reading of the Port Huron Statement would conclude that its authors liked robust, untrammeled, and diverse debate.)
  4. It’s interesting to read this document in conjunction with recent and widely-publicized research by Kyle Dodson, who finds that students’ interactions with faculty tend to moderate their political opinions, but participation in student-led groups makes them more radical. The Port Huron Statement, of course, was written by students, not by faculty. Perhaps it prefigures today’s student organizing but not the current curriculum.

MetroQuest Webinar on Public Engagement for LRTPs, 12/7

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NCDD member org, MetroQuest will be hosting the webinar “Online Public Engagement for Long Range Transportation Planning (LRTP), co-sponsored by NCDD, IAP2, and the American Planning Association (APA). The webinar will be this coming Thurs, Dec 7th at 2pm Eastern/11am Pacific and we think it will be particularly interesting for those working with/for government agencies. Space is limited! So make sure you register ASAP to join the webinar. We encourage you to read MetroQuest’s announcement below or find the original here.

Mastering Online Public Engagement for LRTPs Webinar

If you looking for cost-effective ways to engage the public for Long Range Transportation Planning (LRTP) projects this webinar is for you.

Thursday, December 7
11 am Pacific | 12 pm Mountain | 1 pm Central | 2 pm Eastern

REGISTER NOW

Join Bob Brendal from the Missouri Department of Transportation and Maggie Doll from Burns & McDonnell as they speak about how they engaged over 7,700 people on their 2017 LRTP update.

Connecting with the public on long range planning is not easy. The issues are complex and the public is often preoccupied with short term issues. So what does it take to engage thousands of people across a broad demographic and collect meaningful input on preference and priorities? Find out December 7th.

This highly-visual webinar will showcase the Missouri Transportation Future case study along with proven best practices, research findings and practical tips to guide agencies towards the successful application of online community engagement for LRTP projects.

Attend this webinar to learn how to…

  • Engage more people from a broader demographic
  • Collect informed public input on complex LRTP topics
  • Employ cost-effective strategies for promoting online participation
  • Ensure that your LRTP results are actionable

Seating is limited – save your seat now!

Comments from previous participants…

“I’m going to make your next session required for our planning and public engagement staff.”
“The best presentation on outreach I’ve ever attended (and I’ve done outreach since 1993)”
“Really well-organized and digestible. Lots of good ideas on how to get citizens engaged.”

REGISTER NOW

You can find the original version of this announcement on the MetroQuest blog at www.metroquest.com/Mastering+Online+Public+Engagement+for+LRTPs+