Deliberative Practices as Pedagogy and Tool for the Civic Engagement of Political Science Students

David Matthews (2015, p23) sees deliberation as a necessary tool for students to learn “what is their role in a democracy and how they make a difference in their communities and countries”. It is an experience through which students become active participants in public life and realize that politics is not something that only politicians do. Political science departments, especially, have as one of their objectives to create engaged citizens (Battistoni 2015). Our paper maps the deliberative experiences used in political science courses and reported across universities in the United States and Europe. We see that deliberative forums used in classes have four objectives: to involve students in public life, to improve the quality of teaching techniques, to improve student knowledge and to formulate grievances during student protests. The achievement of these objectives are affected by two factors: the level of public involvement and the students’ perceived efficiency. These two factors intersected create a typology of deliberative practices in political science classes. The scope of this mapping exercise is to highlight the diversity of deliberative pedagogies used in political science classes and suggest that the public impact of deliberation affects its success as a teaching method.