“Moral Deliberation, Disagreement, and Community” was initiated in 1997 as a project to develop new models for teaching undergraduates in first-year writing courses the complex arts of productive argument and disagreement. The project was centered on the idea of deliberation as an ethical, civic, and academic practice. We sought to shift traditional writing instruction from its emphasis upon models of debate and agonistic argument to a focus on deliberative communication.

Our project has evolved through several phases as a result both of our ongoing assessment of our work and of changes in Duke’s writing program. The first phase involved combining parts of classical rhetoric instruction with traditional instruction in ethical theory to develop a model course in “good argument,” a term intended to signify the moral requirements of reasoned disagreement, while recognizing the persistence of dispute and controversy in the public sphere. In the first year of the project, ten instructors from six departments were selected and trained to participate in the program, working with 191 students. Faculty constructed a shared syllabus and a sequence of reading and writing assignments examining contemporary race relations in America.

In the second phase, we worked with 10 teaching fellows and 175 students in twelve sections. Students examined public moral controversies in the areas of genetic testing and education reform, and participated in a student research conference, The Art of Deliberation. The conference required students to collaborate across course sections as they anticipated for their roles as conference organizers and participants. To prepare for phase two, a team of instructors reconceived and revised course materials, giving greater attention to models of deliberation as they appear across various public spheres, ranging from popular to scholarly writings.

Building on the first two years of model-building and methods clarification, the third phase of the project worked to infuse the teaching of moral deliberation across much of the first-year writing curriculum, in eighty-six sections of the course involving 1200 students. Each section focused on one of six contemporary moral issues (public health, crime and punishment, race relations, technology and privacy, environmental policy, and celebrity culture). The students commented on each others’ papers across sections, using web-based text-sharing software. This allowed students to compose arguments for a broader and more diverse audience. The course stressed the uses of writing beyond the classroom, as both a civic and intellectual activity, and was able to foster specific attention to the ethical requirements of deliberative disagreement as a lived practice (highlighting civility, qualified claim-making, scrupulous offering of reasons, and intellectual fairness as its key elements). Selected students’ work from the project was published in Deliberations, our annual journal of first-year writing at Duke.

Writing faculty continue to infuse their courses with a focus on deliberative writing practices, especially those pertaining to public moral controversies. In addition, several writing faculty have collaborated to develop courses on such topics as Making Amends: The Uses and Limits of Public Apology, focused on controversies both at home and abroad where public apology, reparation, and other forms of restitution or restorative justice have been established or are being contemplated and Regarding the Subject: Problems and Potentials of Public Photography, which examined the ethics and rhetoric of the production of photojournalistic images of war, catastrophe, and human suffering. Another faculty member has created a course on popular debates and public writing that invites students to deliberate as a class in identifying an issue of mutual interest that becomes the focus of their writing throughout the semester.

For examples of course materials, click here.