Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community: Connecting Deliberative Dialogue, Community Engagement, and Democratic Education

This essay offer insights into civic education programs and practices which attempt to bridge pedagogical divides by offering an approach to deliberative dialogue that goes beyond the classroom and into the community. This more collaborative model draws upon historical and contemporary examples of what I have termed "deliberative education in the community," and offers the promise of a different kind of politics, model of engagement, and style of education in higher education. The essay concludes with a call for a more collaborative approach to engaged teaching and learning.


Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community: What is it?
The efficacy of public deliberation at resolving complex issues has led to its elements being incorporated into domains beyond the public policy or political sphere. One of the most prominent of these areas is education, specifically, deliberation as an integral part of pedagogy. The difference between deliberative politics and deliberative pedagogy is that the former integrates deliberative decision-making with public action (Mathews, 2012), and the latter integrates deliberative decision-making with teaching and learning.
Deliberative pedagogy in the community is a collaborative approach that melds deliberative dialogue, community engagement, and democratic education. While different, the approach is not entirely new. It draws upon the historical efforts of the Highlander Folk School during the civil rights movement that was led by pioneering educators such as Myles Horton, Septima Clark, and Bernice Robinson. Much has been written about the Highlander tradition that connects education with social change (see for instance, Adams, 1975 andGlen, 1996), but there has been little research on how the processes used at Highlander can inform the practices of deliberative pedagogy. This is especially timely as a growing number of projects are involving college students in deliberative conversations outside what can sometimes be "the bubble" of the college campus. Specifically, students are stepping outside the classroom and connecting theory with real-world community problem-solving through intergenerational "learning circles" with new immigrants, forums with community members on public issues, and multiyear civic engagement courses. Faculty and students are co-creating shared spaces for dialogue and collaborative action in the community and rethinking long-held power dynamics between the campus and the community. This effort-and others like it-is not without its challenges; however they have the potential to shift our basic understanding of the role of higher education in society.
Deliberative pedagogy holds enormous promise in promoting the civic mission of higher education through more collaborative approaches to teaching and learning that respond to important and rapidly shifting contextual trends: increasing diversity, new technologies that promote transparency and collaboration, and ardent desire of young people to "make a difference" through concrete social action. It moves the academy from the more traditional "teaching-to-learning" dynamic toward a model of "collaborative engagement" in which knowledge is more genuinely co-created through reflective public action. This shift toward collaboration also helps illuminate the civic dimensions of teaching and learning that increasing numbers of students are demanding and for which the communities in which higher education institutions are located-most of which are struggling with complex problems-are asking.

Deliberative Dialogue, Community Engagement, and Democratic Education
My first introduction to deliberative pedagogy came as an undergraduate student in the mid-1990s. As part of a course on diversity, my classmates and I participated in a deliberative forum on affirmative action with inner-city high school students at a public school in the local neighborhood. The dialogue with a diverse group of young people made me think more clearly about the policy choices that can be taken to overcome the pervasive racial injustice in American society; it also helped me see the power of a different kind of politics to address contentious issues like affirmative action and racism.
This course also included a service-learning requirement, so these deliberative conversations were grounded in real-world experiences. I was working with the principal, teachers, and students to start an afterschool program at a local middle school, seeing firsthand the inequities in education in urban schools, especially along the lines of race. But I was also learning how reciprocal partnerships could contribute to alleviating these challenges-even if only in a small way. This helped me see how a different kind of engagement could tap new resources for education reform.
I was also introduced to a different style of teaching and learning-sometimes called "popular" or "democratic" education-that involved students as active participants in their own education. I found inspiration in the idea that education could "free the powers" of learners, as Jane Addams (1902Addams ( /2002 described, and how this tradition of education was integral to past social change efforts such as the labor and civil rights movements through the Highlander Folk School. This helped me see that education could be a liberating experience and how a different kind of learning could lead to action. I now realize from my introduction to a different kind of politics, model of engagement, and style of education that these serve as the foundation for communitybased deliberative pedagogy or what I am now calling "deliberative pedagogy in the community." Deliberative pedagogy in the community brings three overlapping ways of teaching and learning together: deliberative dialogue, community engagement, and democratic education (see Figure One).

Talking Outside the Classroom
Throughout our nation's history, education has been linked to the promise of democracy. Public deliberation classrooms of all types, from kindergarten to higher education. For instance, a teacher might use public deliberation to help students understand the nature of public po choices, to develop skills at group co such as immigration, the federal debt, deliberation tend to be important examples teaching and learning.
Yet too often over the past century education has been confined to the classroom theoretical exercise, and tends to value civic knowledge and attitudes above mor oriented civic values, such as civic practices and as it overlooks the many assets of "The American tendency to equate education and schooling and make schools the instrument for satisfying our wants and alleviating our malaise takes attention from our circumstances," writes John Goodlad contextual circumstances unaddressed" Schooling and communities each must be addressed by harnessing the many talents in the entire "ecology of education" (Cremin, 1976). Thus, community centers, places of worship, libraries, local

Talking Outside the Classroom
Throughout our nation's history, education has been linked to the promise of eliberation is often used as a vehicle to make this connection of all types, from kindergarten to higher education. For instance, a teacher might use public deliberation to help students understand the nature of public po , to develop skills at group communication, or to understand specific , the federal debt, or educational reform. These approaches important examples not only of civic learning, but also over the past century, the connection between democracy and been confined to the classroom. This makes civic learning a more theoretical exercise, and tends to value civic knowledge and attitudes above mor such as civic practices and public skills. It is also too constricting verlooks the many assets of neighborhood and community institutions "The American tendency to equate education and schooling and make schools the instrument for satisfying our wants and alleviating our malaise takes attention from our nces," writes John Goodlad (1997). "We beat on schools, leaving the contextual circumstances unaddressed" (p. 41).
Schooling and communities are inextricably linked: solutions to the problems in each must be addressed by harnessing the many talents in the entire "ecology of Thus, community centers, places of worship, libraries, local Throughout our nation's history, education has been linked to the promise of make this connection in of all types, from kindergarten to higher education. For instance, a teacher might use public deliberation to help students understand the nature of public policy specific public issues approaches to public not only of civic learning, but also of engaged acy and civic learning a more theoretical exercise, and tends to value civic knowledge and attitudes above more actiontoo constricting for learning. "The American tendency to equate education and schooling and make schools the instrument for satisfying our wants and alleviating our malaise takes attention from our beat on schools, leaving the linked: solutions to the problems in each must be addressed by harnessing the many talents in the entire "ecology of Thus, community centers, places of worship, libraries, local businesses, coffee shops, and the networks of other community institutions should be seen as part of the learning ecosystem.
A growing number of educators are recognizing the power of the community for civic learning, drawing upon the educational philosophies of Jane Addams, John Dewey, Elsie Clapp, Myles Horton, Lawrence Cremin, and others (Longo, 2007). These educators have found that thinking more broadly about where and how learning takes place is equally as important as what is learned. It also unleashes a vast set of resources for learning and allows education to be more connected to democratic revitalization.
Education in the community is active learning that takes place outside of, but often connected with, the classroom. It involves more than a short-term community service project; it means intentionally putting education in the context of long-term community-building efforts. It is most often place-based, using a collaborative, integrated, problem-solving approach (Smith, 1992;Stein, 2001).
The role of community more often gets recognized as part of student internships, practicums, international immersion, and especially service-learning courses in higher education. There is also a strand of education in the community that includes public deliberation. Thus, deliberative pedagogy is being used in a growing number of courses and programs (described below), where students are involved in public deliberation in community-based settings that go well beyond my introduction to deliberation as an undergraduate.
Today, students are involved in a variety of deliberative projects that ask them to take leadership in their local communities. Students lead dialogues about complex issues with campus and community stakeholders and reflection sessions for service-learning courses. Students are involved in efforts to magnify the voices of young people on public issues and capture the stories of the elders in a community. They use not only forums, but also photography, dance, film, poetry, and other forms of art to facilitate community deliberations.
Deliberative pedagogy in the community connects-and transforms-deliberative dialogue, community engagement, and democratic education by attempting to create space for reciprocal conversations that are grounded in real-world experiences. Harry Boyte notes how reflective practice emerges from including deliberative aspects in public work. "When collective labor becomes public work with deliberative dimensions, both labor and deliberation take on new powers," explains Boyte, one of the leading thinkers arguing for civic renewal in higher education. "Deliberative public work creates reflective learning cultures in which citizens come to understand the value of different views and in which they revisit the significance of what they create" (p. 11). Boyte also notes the significant shift that happens when citizens, as opposed to experts, are "at the center" of decision-making.

Deliberative Pedagogy and Highlander Folk School
The Highlander Folk School in the mountains of Tennessee provides perhaps the most prescient historical example of this kind of "citizen-centered" approach, with deliberative pedagogy outside the boundaries of the traditional classroom. Highlander Folk School was co-founded in 1932 by Myles Horton, an educator who was looking for a way to put his hopes for social justice through democratic education into practice. Inspired by community-based educational models such as the Danish Folk Schools, along with conversations with leaders such as Jane Addams, Highlander became an educational hub for the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s and the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s; and Highlander (now named the Highlander Research and Education Center) continues to practice deliberative pedagogy on a host of social issues ranging from youth leadership and environmental sustainability, to immigrant rights and racial justice.
The foundation of this deliberative pedagogy involves trusting in people. Horton (1998) explains: When Highlander workshops are described to people who haven't experienced them, it often sounds like we are always contradicting ourselves, because we do things differently every time, according to what is needed. We've changed methods and techniques over the years, but the philosophy and conditions for learning stay the same. There is no method to learn from Highlander. What we do involves trusting people and believing in their ability to think for themselves. (p. 157) Trusting in people meant investing time and energy in the individuals, groups, and communities that Highlander worked with, and is part of the type of deliberative pedagogy that has been described as a "circle of learners" (Horton, 1998(Horton, , 1985. "I think of an educational workshop as a circle of learners," Horton (1998) writes. '"Circle' is not an accidental term, for there is no head of the table at Highlander workshops; everybody sits around a circle" (p. 150). Out of this description, others have termed the deliberative style of teaching and learning at Highlander "learning circles" (Wallace, 2011). Learning circles have subsequently been used by publicly-engaged faculty in a variety of contexts, including through the creation of the Invisible College, a faculty-led organization that convened at Highlander in the mid-1990s. The Invisible College helped to launch a national conversation about the role of faculty in "social transformation through the transformation of institutions of postsecondary education…using pedagogies of community-based instruction" (Wallace, 1995).
While at one time Highlander considered initiating a community school for all ages, infusing its educational philosophy into traditional education, that plan never materialized. Rather, Highlander's aim has been to work with people and communities for social justice outside traditional educational institutions. Highlander tried to find people with common concerns, invite them to talk through their problems in a safe environment, and then support them in finding solutions through a democratic exchange of ideas. This is very different from most classrooms in higher education; learning did not lead to a grade or credential, expertise was grounded in the stories and experiences of all participants, and a great deal of time was dedicated to using narratives to create a collective consciousness and then act.
Highlander workshops were based on "mining" the experiences that participants brought with them to the workshop. The core ingredient for any learning circle is the idea that experiences are co-created based on people's stories. Conversation begins where people are, and then grows out of these experiences. Horton wanted participatory, active learners; not what Paulo Freire (1970Freire ( /2000 calls passive learners, who are simply asked to put information "into a bank" to be retrieved on command at a later date. With this approach, small learning communities with deep relationships took precedence over larger, more passive groups. For instance, Horton (n.d.) once tellingly wrote, "Twenty learners will eventually reach more people and be more effective than two hundred listeners." In a conversation with Freire, Horton describes how Highlander's theory of education involves more than people simply sitting in a circle, chatting, without any direction-a critique often leveled at deliberative dialogue. Horton (Horton & Freire, 1990) responds by comparing democratic education to planting a garden: Someone criticized Highlander workshops, saying, 'All you do is sit there and tell stories.' Well, if he'd seen me in the spring planting my garden, he would've said: 'That guy doesn't know how to grow vegetables. I don't see any vegetables.'… Well he was doing the same thing about observing the workshop. It was the seeds getting ready to start, and he thought that was the whole process. To me it's essential that you start where people are. But if you're going to start where they are and they don't change, then there's no point in starting because you're not going anywhere…. But if you don't have some vision of what ought to be or what they can become, then you have no way of contributing anything to the process. (pp. 99-100) The seeds of Highlander's educational method grew in dramatic ways. Highlander's most famous student, Rosa Parks, for example, attended a Highlander workshop in the summer before the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Horton, 1966). Other well-known successes include the development of the citizenship schools spearheaded by local leaders such as Septima Clark, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins with support from Highlander during the Civil Rights movement (Tjerandsen, 1980). Among the significant contributions of Highlander are the decision-making processes that are used. Learning circles empower people by democratizing decisionmaking. And this, for Horton, was integrally tied to education. He argued that learning and decision-making are inseparable. "People learn from making decisions," Horton (1973 explains, "and making decisions helps them learn" (p. 245). Thus, Highlander involved students in naming, framing, and ultimately, acting on the issues that mattered most to them.
Lamenting the hierarchical nature of decision-making in education, controlled by a small group of experts with narrow specializations often in the name of efficiency, Horton (1976 states: "If we are to have a democratic society, people must find or invent new channels through which decisions are made" (p. 252). Some of these channels, as we shall see in the next section, are taking root through deliberative pedagogy in higher education today.

Deliberative Pedagogy in Higher Education Today
While the democratic practices at Highlander during the social movements of the past took place in very different settings from today's colleges and universities, the history of deliberative pedagogy in the community offers significant lessons for higher education today. In contemporary higher education, many promising efforts are taking place that infuse deliberative pedagogy into engaged learning, including in a growing number of campus-community partnerships.
As mentioned above, learning circles were central to the creation of the Invisible College, an organization for publicly-engaged faculty. This had an impact on faculty members who then have brought the Highlander tradition into their teaching. A participant in these learning circles at Highlander, David Cooper (2008) of Michigan State University, for instance, writes that applying the sort of "democratic pedagogy Horton has in mind" means: "first and foremost linking students' academic learning with experiences of democratic building and public work, learning that is rigorously situated in lived contexts and grounded in action." Cooper, a leader in the fields of deliberative democracy and community engagement, then concludes with what this means for the way he assesses his teaching: "I hardly ever ask, 'how well am I teaching?'" Instead, echoing the shift away from an instructional paradigm, he asks: "What am I learning? and am I getting out of my students' way?" (p. 126).
The practice of deliberative pedagogy in the community can likewise have a profound impact on students, as seen in campus-community partnerships, such as the Jane Addams School in St. Paul, Minnesota. Like Highlander, Jane Addams School "teaches that democracy happens in real time and place" (Kari and Skelton, 2007, p. 14) as the community-based school involves college students, young people, and immigrant community members in ongoing deliberative conversations and joint public work projects. This helps participants develop civic skills, such as genuinely listening in an open-minded way and recognizing the wisdom of community voices. One college student involved in Jane Addams School explains how the experiences taught her one couldn't get all the answers from "reading something in a book." She reflects that "the space at Jane Addams School asks you to consider what other people are saying-to consider other voices, others' knowledge…as legitimate sources" (Kari and Skelton, 2007, p. 30).
There are other examples of deliberative pedagogy in the community occurring in higher education. These examples include programs that prepare students to lead deliberative forums using "passionate impartiality" in community settings; multiyear efforts that allow cohorts of students to master the art of deliberative dialogue on campus, while also participating in service-learning courses; and projects that help students facilitate community visioning and planning. When these kinds of communitybased partnerships are done well, according to one researcher, they serve dual purposes, allowing: 1) the community to come together for the first time to "actually hammer out a set of concrete plans for the town's future;" and 2) the college "to extend its reach in the community and contribute resources and expertise in a uniquely collaborative and participatory way" (London, 2010, p. 5).
An initial survey of some of these partnerships follows.
• Jane Addams School for Democracy, located in a neighborhood that has been termed "the Ellis Island of the Midwest" on the West Side of St. Paul, involves college students and faculty from local colleges working with new immigrants and refugees in cross-cultural learning circles several times per week. Using the mantra, "We are all teachers, we are all learners," the project immerses university students in reciprocal conversations which lead to joint public work. Projects include language learning and citizenship test preparation, community gardening, youth organizing to improve the schools, and interactive candidate forums (Kari and Skelton, 2007;Longo, 2007).
• The Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University offers a yearlong course through the Department of Communications for undergraduate students that enable them to learn the theory and practice of deliberative democracy. The faculty, staff, and students from the Center pride themselves on the "passionate impartiality" they bring to community issues, which Martin Carcasson argues is an essential, but often neglected, aspect of democracy. The students in the course-termed "Student Associates"-are involved in moderating community forums in Colorado using National Issue Forums (NIF) guide books on topics like school funding and child care. As facilitators in the community, students can bring a passion for the process, without necessarily an agenda for the results (Carcasson, 2010).
• Wake Forest University sponsored a four-year project with thirty undergraduate Democracy Fellows learning about deliberative democracy by organizing and moderating forums not only on campus, but also "on the road" in the local community. As part of the project, the Democracy Fellows organized a community deliberation in Winston-Salem on urban sprawl that involved a number of community leaders in the process, including the mayor, an executive of the Chamber of Commerce, and members of several neighborhood councils (Harriger and McMillan, 2007). Democracy Fellows participated in a course, Citizen and Community, where they examined public education using an NIF issue guide on public schooling, along with a service-learning project partnering with a local organization to facilitate a series of study circle dialogues on public schooling (Crawford, 2008).
• The New England Center for Civic Life involves students from Franklin Pierce University using art and dialogue around a host of issues, including campus-wide conversations on water-related environmental issues in Rindge, New Hampshire (Doherty, 2010). In addition, the Center helped facilitate a community visioning process about sustainable growth in Rindge that involved students in what they termed "problem-based service learning" (London, 2010, p. 5).
• Hofstra University's Center for Civic Engagement sponsored a program called "Deepening Democracy through Deliberation" to generate community-wide conversations on public issues leading up to the presidential election in 2012 (including the Presidential Debate hosted at Hofstra). The program organized public forums facilitated by well-trained undergraduate students in schools and public libraries on policy issues such as education and the United States' role in the world.
• At Michigan State University, several humanities courses, including a general education writing requirement and a senior American Studies Capstone seminar, infuse deliberative democracy into the curriculum. The curriculum, according to David Cooper (2008), has the unique distinction of being "a pedagogy that cross fertilizes active learning techniques, particularly service-learning, and deliberative democracy practices, such as public forums, study circles, and civic engagement opportunities for students" (p. 114).

Providence College Smith Hill Annex
Providence College's Feinstein Institute for Public Service is also experimenting with deliberative pedagogy in the community with the development of the PC/Smith Hill Annex. The Annex, a 1,000 square-foot storefront leased by Providence College from the Smith Hill Community Development Corporation, draws explicitly on the lessons of Myles Horton and other historical democratic experiments such as Jane Addams' Hull House and the social settlement movement (Addams, 1910(Addams, /1998Longo, 2007).
Keith Morton of Providence College, who spearheaded the project, describes it as "a space for community and campus to come together." The Annex hosts courses open to students and community members; potluck dinners and book clubs; breakdance, exercise and street art programs; strategic planning meetings of partner organizations; education and support groups for people contending with a variety of challenges-any configuration that will bring campus and community into dialogue. The expectation is that over time the co-creation of this shared space will facilitate campus and community "getting to know one another as neighbors." Morton concludes: "Our deep hope is that these conversations will help the people and institutions articulate and realize what it is that they find most meaningful" (Battistoni et al., Forthcoming).
As part of the Annex, the Department of Public and Community Service Studies at Providence College is partnering with College Unbound, an experimental college for non-traditional college students, and several local high schools and community-based organizations to explore the theme "The City and…" An annual course on the topic, which includes college students, high school students, and community members meeting weekly, provides space for intergenerational conversations and reflective practice around the city of Providence. The first course in fall of 2011, The City and Its Youth, examined the theme of youth and youthwork. The subsequent course, The City and Its Storytellers, focused on capturing neighborhood-based storytelling in Providence. Future themes being considered include The City and Its Arts, The City and the World, and the City and Its Future.

Overcoming Challenges
These initiatives offer compelling examples of the potential link between deliberation dialogue, community engagement, and democratic education; but there are also challenges with asking college students to take real responsibility in the community. Unlike Highlander, the above examples are located within the confines of university education, which is built upon numerous artificial constructions of time. Students take classes measured in credit hours, courses are offered in terms, schedules change each semester until students amass enough hours at the university to graduate. These ways of thinking about time grow out of a scientific conception of learning. John Tagg (2003) suggests that common conceptions of time in higher education result in a limited "time horizon." That is, students and professors think they will have to live with the consequences of their actions at school for only a brief time.
As one example of this limited time horizon, Herman Blake tells a story of trying to see if some of his college students could intern at Highlander. Blake had been at Highlander, knew Myles Horton, and was aware of Highlander's work with communities. Thinking this would be an ideal learning experience for his students, he asked Horton, still director of Highlander, if students from Santa Cruz could come and do internships at Highlander. "Yes," Horton replied, "we will be glad to have them, provided that they stay with us for two years" (quoted in Wallace, 2000, p. 133). This type of community commitment does not fit into the current structure of higher education. Harriger and McMillan (2007) address another aspect of the challenge of students working in communities for limited amounts of time as they struggled with student accountability in the Democracy Fellows program at Wake Forest. In their study, Harriger and McMillan chronicle some of the "ethical dilemmas" they faced as public scholars and teachers weighing the competing demands of educating their students, while also being citizens and neighbors themselves in the community. "We came face-to-face with what it means when the community itself becomes the learning environment" (p. 113), they wrote in recognizing the different reward systems and time horizons between the campus and the community.
Harriger and McMillan ultimately worked through these tensions. But the faculty members were left with questions about whether they, as teachers and mentors, should allow their students to fail, which might be a good learning experience-at the expense of the community; or alternatively, whether they should "intervene with expertise… to help ensure the most productive outcome for the community we all share" (p. 112).
Others have raised similar challenges about the role of student leadership in the community. For instance, Richard Cone, an early pioneer in service-learning at the University of Southern California, offers a challenge that empowering students in campus-community partnerships means giving ownership of civic engagement efforts to the most transient and least experienced of those involved in the partnerships. The ethical dilemma that Cone shares is the uncertainty as to "how to engage students in a way that they acquired a sense of humility and a respect for those they 'serve.'" Cone questions the privilege associated with many students in institutions of higher learning, who he fears "would use their service experiences to acquire skills and knowledge they could use to further disenfranchise those already disenfranchised" (p. 21). In giving students more responsibility for leading deliberation in the community, do we run the risk of increasing their sense of privilege and shifting control of the learning even further away from the community?
These challenges can be overcome, however, by applying the heightened expectations which come from what Richard Battistoni has termed a "sustained, development, cohort" curriculum that prepares and supports students to be engaged democratic citizens in community settings. Battistoni and his colleagues (Mitchel et al., 2011) describe the impact of multiyear programs such as the Public and Community Service Studies major at Providence College, the Citizen Scholar Program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the Public Service Scholars Program at Stanford University-all programs which have existed since the mid-1990s-on the formation of civic identities and effective campus-community partnerships. These programs each contain several fundamental principles that help produce students with an enhanced civic identity and the skills necessary for relational, action-oriented leadership: student voice, community collaboration, engaged scholarship, and a commitment to reflective practice. Furthermore, when community partnerships are long-term, reciprocal relationships, space is opened for experimentation, mistakes, and flexibility as both sides of the partnership see themselves as dedicated to the long haul.
Deliberative pedagogy in the community also seems to offer an opportunity to address other criticisms leveled against deliberative dialogue and community engagement, respectively. For instance, one criticism of deliberative dialogue is a version of the old adage "all talk, no action"-or as Myles Horton explained how some thought that at Highlander: "All you do is sit there and tell stories." In advocating for the importance of including public work in deliberative dialogue, Harry Boyte (1995) explains: Deliberative democracy, welcome as it is, is not enough. Alone, it all too easily takes on a hortatory, idealized quality that separates out an abstract "public sphere" of communicative consensus from real world politics built upon negotiation, bargaining, messy compromise and also creative work to what was once termed, in American history, the commonwealth. (The Public Sphere, para. 33) Similarly, critics point to the seemingly apolitical nature of community engagement. This can be seen in the language and framework of service-learning, the most common form of community engagement, with its emphasis on "serving needs" and addressing community "deficiencies" (McKnight 1995). Many forms of community engagement also fail to recognize the nature of politics and power. Boyte (2004) contends that service routinely "neglects to teach about root causes and power relationships, fails to stress productive impact, ignores politics, and downplays the strengths and talents of those being served" (p. 12).
Deliberative pedagogy in the community opens opportunities for public deliberation to recognize the political aspects of community engagement; for community engagement to incorporate collective action into public deliberation; and for democratic education to foster empowerment and reciprocity into teaching and learning.

Conclusion: Toward Collaborative Engagement
"Deliberative democracy challenges academic institutions at every level: from the nature of teaching and the character of the extracurricular program to the very meaning of scholarship," writes David Mathews (2009, p. 13), president of the Kettering Foundation and a former U.S. cabinet secretary responsible for overseeing education policy. And when rooted in the community, deliberative pedagogy also offers higher education an example of the type of civic innovation needed for colleges and universities to respond to the complex challenges facing society.
Deliberative pedagogy in the community challenges our ideas about politics, engagement, and education by building on the historical lessons from the Highlander Folk School and several promising practices on campuses today. This framework also seems to offer insight into what the next paradigm of teaching and learning is likely to look like.
Almost twenty years ago, Barr and Tagg (1995) articulated an important conceptual shift in teaching and learning-from an instructional to a learning paradigm-that is taking place across the landscape of higher education. This shift moves a college from an institution that exists to provide instruction, to an institution that exists to provide learning. With the learning-centered approach, they write, the college's purpose serves "not to transfer knowledge but to create environments and experiences that bring students to discover and construct knowledge for themselves, to make students members of communities of learning that make discoveries and solve problems" (p. 15). And yet, as the case of Highlander and a growing number of campus programs make clear, when deliberative pedagogy takes place outside the classroom, it recognizes the importance of the community for civic learning.
The examples of deliberative pedagogy in the community seem to go beyond a simple teacher-learner dichotomy by fully incorporating the ecology of educational opportunities available to students. Building on these insights, the Next Generation Engagement Project sponsored by New England Resource Center for Higher Education has begun to argue that deliberative, reciprocal, co-creative engagement is the foundation for a new framework for teaching and learning, what might be termed "collaborative engagement." The emergence of this new collaborative paradigm is partly the result of significant cultural transformations, especially the advent and adaptation of innovative technologies that have revolutionized the ways in which people communicate, work, and learn. This idea, however, also echoes ideas from educational figures, such as John Dewey (1910), who believed that knowledge and learning are most effective when people work collaboratively to solve specific, real world problems. "Thinking," he wrote, "begins in…a forked road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which poses alternatives" (p.11). But to really be immersed in these kinds of forked-road situations most often requires going outside the boundaries of the classroom and involving the community as reciprocal partners and co-educators. Building on Dewey's belief in the connections between learning and community problem-solving, we have witnessed democratic experiments in teaching and learning such as the learning circles utilized by Highlander Folk School. This model is also emerging in higher education in what I have termed "deliberative pedagogy in the community." These shifts mean not only recognizing new places for learning, but also recognizing the need for new connections. Thus, in order to fully develop and implement a new paradigm for teaching and learning, we need to be, well, even more collaborative. This is a call for us to practice collaborative engagement by breaking the disciplining silos that engulf even reform movements in higher education, a call for connecting academic learning with community engagement, democratic education, and deliberative dialogue. In short, we need to do more talking-and engaging collaboratively-in the community.