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Listening to strangers at school

Q: Which two angles does Parker use to explain why seminar and deliberation have the potential for engendering political trust?

The collaborative intellectual and emotional work involved in seminar and deliberation.

5 important questions on Listening to strangers at school

Which two angles does Parker use to explain why seminar and deliberation have the potential for engendering political trust?

The collaborative intellectual and emotional work involved in seminar and deliberation.

What happens in a seminar? What is it's goal?

1) Participants together interpret an essay, book, play, or painting, they speak and listen to learn.
2) Seminars encourage students to see the world more deeply and clearly thanks to the text, opening question, and multiple interpretations and experiences that are brought to bear by discussants.

What happens in a deliberation? What is it's goal?

1) Deliberations encourage discussants to think together, with and across their differences.
2) The discussion is aimed at deciding, and the text is a controversial issue. Discussants are finding, studying, and weighing alternatives in order to decide a course of action - a public policy.

How are seminar and deliberation different?

Seminar is focussed on world-revealing (enlightening) functions of classroom discussion. Does not try to make metarial progress in the world.

Deliberation is focussed on world-changing (engaging) functions of classroom discussion. Concerned with action in the world.

Seminar and deliberation need to done with others, why?

1) Democratic ethos: The problem is shared, the decision-making should be shared.
2) Scientific ethos: Inquiry is a public matter, open disputation as to who has got it right.
3) Collaboration ethos: the array of alternative interpretations (in seminar) and solutions (in deliberation) that a group generates will be broader than one could accomplish working alone.
4) Pluralism ethos: Alternatives stem from different social perspectives, and these from social positions, that are more or less different from one's own, thereby developing the participant social knowledge while contributing to a better solution.