Civic Discourse Pedagogies in American Higher Education: Tracing Historical Patterns, Enduring Paradigms, and Future Possibilities

Abstract

Civic discourse on college campuses has become a flashpoint in American politics. Amid deep political division, rising threats to freedom of inquiry and speech, and declining public trust, colleges and universities are seeking ways to teach and practice the communication across difference so essential to their civic, educational, and scholarly missions. Importantly, this is not the first time institutions of higher education have sought new approaches to civic discourse education in response to profound societal changes and challenges. They have done so repeatedly, stretching back to higher education’s earliest days in colonial America. In this dissertation, I draw on histories of American politics, higher education, ideas, and philosophy to make two core arguments. First, I demonstrate that the emergence of civic discourse pedagogies in American higher education has followed a historical pattern: Societal change has generated new visions of politics; together with the transformative forces that shaped them, these visions have led to new conceptions of higher education’s mission and new ideas about the kinds of citizens higher education should aim to produce. These conceptions have demanded new approaches to civic education, spurring the creation of new ways to teach civic discourse. Second, I argue that these new pedagogies were not just instructional innovations. Rather, they were products of new paradigms of civic discourse practice and pedagogy, rooted in specific notions of personhood, power, and social epistemology. I build this argument by analyzing three examples of pedagogical emergence: the development of forensic debate in the mid-1700s; deliberative discussion in the early 20th century; and intergroup dialogue in the late 1980s. These models of pedagogical emergence and paradigm development constitute new scholarly contributions—ones that provide analytical tools that can help us understand and reframe our contemporary challenges of civic discourse. In my final chapters, I demonstrate this point by applying these models to our recent history. Ultimately, my hope is that viewing campus civic discourse in historical perspective can support the vital work of sustaining conversations across difference amid the critical challenges facing higher education today.