I offer the story and our discussion around it as a way to speak to many of the similar debates going on within IF about how we can best serve the public.

Le Guin’s short-story described a utopian city, full of wealth and abundance, where everyone was, intellectual, sophisticated and cosmopolitan. There were festivals of wine and food, and everyone got along wonderfully. About halfway through the story, you learn the secret of the city’s success: There was a child being kept in a dark, dirty closet. The child had matted-up hair, and if you got close enough you could hear the child pleading to be let out and promising to be “good.” All adults, upon coming of age, learned about the existence of this child. But they all knew that if anyone were to let the child out, all of their prosperity and happiness would vanish.

Omelas remained populated by people who accepted the child’s existence as the price to be paid for all the privileges they enjoyed. But the story ended with a few of the citizens who chose to silently walk away to places unknown. “But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas,” Le Guin wrote.

In our discussion in Aspen, responses to the story ran the gamut. Some were horrified at those who did not walk away. Others, especially those who did grassroots international aid work in some of the most wretched places of the earth, said there is another word for the existence of the child: “collateral damage.” My contribution to the discussion was to recall a class session I did with my Georgetown students this summer where we read and critiqued Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism. One Pulitzer Prize-winning article, “The Girl in the Window” featured the plight of a child in Florida was actually living this hell. The “feral child” was trapped for years in a closet, as the child’s mother neglected her and social workers failed to intervene.

So for me, not only was the existence of the child a matter of fact, I also had come to feel like I was beginning to taste a little bit of what Omelas might feel like since I joined IF. In IF-sponsored discussions, we have food and drink and discussion. We engage in civil deliberation with our fellow citizens around issues of importance to the whole country. I have described both IF and the Aspen Ideas Festival as kind of a “nerd heaven.” And to be engaged in this kind of life of the mind is an incredibly privileged thing to make a living doing this—to me.

One thing to remember, though, is that sitting around and talking about public policy is not everyone’s idea of a utopia. There has been some pushback against the idea that intellectual work is better than manual work by writers like Matthew B. Crawford, a University of Chicago-trained PhD who abandoned his career at a D.C. think tank and became a motorcycle mechanic. (See Crawford’s excellent piece in the New York Times magazine from 2009 in which he effectively challenges elites who say working with your hands is not creative, intellectual or valuable work.) Society has many lanes, each with their own rewards and limits. But when we at IF do our work with the assumption that everyone is thirsty for this kind of experience or considers it Omelas, it takes on an uncomfortable, missionary zeal.

I am living proof that the propensity or proclivity to want to experience IF discussions do not fall along lines of class or race. Upon embarking on my first project, my approach will be to invite a wide range of people to participate in IF discussions. Because I live in D.C. and because I have access to certain kind of social networks, there is a high probability that they will be younger and include more people of color. I believe that it makes for a richer discussion and a greater contrast in possibilities when more people from more walks of life are at the table. However, targeting a specific race or class on a particular topic makes assumptions about that group that are uncomfortable to me.

Unlike Le Guin’s work of fiction, there was no Faustian bargain that allows IF the privilege of being able to live in our own idea of Omelas: There was just the dogged determination of a man named Jay Stern. It is a quirk of history, West Virginia geography, energy policies, the legal system, and fate that all of us at IF are able to live on the fruits of the Stern family’s fortune. Upon being handed the baton with his family’s bank and coal land investments, Jay fought, scrapped and squeezed every last drop from those assets so that they may be used to fulfill his vision. He could have lived much fancier. He and Margaret could have adopted a brood of children to whom pass on their fortune. He could have bought jets and expensive clothes and spent his days traveling the world. He could have donated his fortunes to organizations engaged in actively breaking the child out of the proverbial closet.

Instead, though, he spent his remaining decades building his own kind of Omelas, brick-by-brick, in the form of the Interactivity Foundation.  To the extent that his resources allowed, Jay wanted members of the public to not just be able to not just imagine it in a work of fiction, but to experience this kind of Omelas. That was his wish.

Back in Aspen, the session moderator concluded his presentation this way: “I know everyone in this room would tear down that door. That’s why you’re here.”

I’m still chewing over what that means. All I know is that none of the scholars walked away from Aspen. In fact, I’m hoping I get invited back next year.

We have not fully explored the various ways that we might do this or the stages at which it might be most appropriate. I recently had an opportunity to experiment a bit with the idea through developmental citizen discussions of my first draft report from a recently concluded sanctuary project (Helping Out: U.S. Humanitarian Policy for Global Security). I held two separate discussion series on the draft in two different cities as “practice runs” for prospective panelists for a future sanctuary project. I was very open about the possibility of using their feedback for further development of the draft report.

These discussion series were reviewed as per IF practice in a “discussion summary” and there was a high level of participation in our surveymonkey.com questionnaire. While I am still in the process of evaluating how to use the developmental feedback from these discussions, I do have some initial impressions of advantages and disadvantages of using citizen discussions as a developmental tool for our reports.

Advantages

• The “fresh eyes” of the citizen discussants creates an opportunity to move beyond the emotional attachments and unconscious “compromises” that may have occurred in a sanctuary project. Citizen discussants seem capable of identifying approaches that project panelists may have simply missed.
• Citizen discussants seem very sensitive to “jargon” and “insider thinking” that can develop during the course of a sanctuary project and which come to shape the subsequent report. They will often come up with alternative framings and wordings that help clarify possibilities.
• Citizen discussants usually form first impressions of a report that are closer to what we might expect of the general public. This sometimes means they will recognize possibilities that are “straw men” (half-hearted or filler possibilities that seek to provide more contrast, but do not always contribute to the vitality of the discussion if no one takes them seriously) or that are variations on other possibilities.
• Developmental discussions by citizens also contribute to a sense of a report as a living, evolving product, not a static list of concepts frozen in the time  and context of the sanctuary project. Use of the feedback from citizen discussion could and should contribute to development of reports that stimulate more robust public conversation in more effective ways.

Disadvantages

• Citizen discussion groups are not always as balanced in skills and experiences as project panels are likely to be. This is especially true where we recruit the citizen discussants through another group or event.
• Discussion of this type can become overly editorial and less conceptual than serves our developmental purposes. Citizen discussants need to understand their role in developing ideas and contributing new ones, so that discussion does not focus on narrow presentational issues.
• Citizen discussions of this type can become too focused on participant preference issues. If the discussant is spending too much time on “likes” and “dislikes” of possibilities instead of qualitative conversation about how a possibility moves discussion along, then it is not aiding the developmental cause.
• A single developmental discussion series is simply a “snapshot” of what six to ten people came up with in eight to ten hours of discussion. The impressions created by such discussion may not always reflect broader societal concerns.

A Final Note

There are goods reasons to continue on with our learning about how to use developmental citizen discussion as a tool in refinement of IF reports and the possibilities they present. However, we may want to give more thought to how we do this and whether it requires some additional evaluation tools. I would also add that project facilitators may want to exercise some caution in using prospective panelists in a pending sanctuary project as citizen discussants in reviewing a prior project report draft that poses some overlapping concerns. I have seen some evidence that participants caught between these tasks and expectations can become confused about their roles unless reminded by the facilitator. They can easily interject their thoughts about the upcoming project into their view of the prior project.

Promoting IF Discussion Methodology in Georgia through Teaching

by Ia Natsvlishvili

I recently taught the course “EU Social Policy and Multicultural Processes” at [the] Institute for European Studies, Tbilisi State University, Tbilisi, Georgia. It was for the first time I taught this course using IF methodology.  [The] Course aimed to introduce graduate students [to] social policy as the use of political power to supersede, supplement or modify operations of economic systems in order to achieve results which the economic system would not achieve on its own.  During one month when I was delivering the course using IF discussion methodology, I was receiving conversation advice and recommendations from IF instructors Mr. Mark Notturno and Mrs. Ieva Notturno via Skype. I found these conversations very helpful for the teacher like me who was teaching [a] course using IF discussion methodology for the first time.

The course was delivered and the discussions were conducted in English and the discussion summaries were produced in English too. It seems to me that despite the fact that English was not the native language of the students, the discussions flowed very smoothly.  All students found facilitation sessions very useful. They told to me that discussion and facilitation sessions helped them to improve communication skills and to feel much more self-confident and self directed.  Even when discussants were tired because of very intensive discussion sessions almost every day, they were participating with the interest. I also noticed that sometimes the sessions tended to transform in[to] a general debate rather than facilitation on a specific issue.

Below are some comments from discussion summaries [the students] had developed after their facilitation sessions:

“…..The discussion was very fruitful. From the beginning I thought that it would be difficult to facilitate the discussion and I thought that I could not find the topic to concentrate on. However, after 5 minutes I already found out the right way and the discussion topics were flowing endless from the participants. I tried to be as relaxed as I could in order to create friendly and free atmosphere for the participants of the group. However, I felt that I could not catch up with their discussion and have underrepresented Flip Charts.”

“…….First I thought that I could not manage to facilitate well, but piece by piece everything was putting in order. I would say that I participants were totally involved in our discussion. They were contributing their ideas and helped me to concentrate on our not so interesting topic. …….I would proudly say that we managed to come up from the situation and which is very important, we exchanged our skills and knowledge, and each of us had learnt a lot about this issue.”

“………The process of facilitation was interesting the participants came up with useful ideas regarding our area of concern… The participants were very productive, however I think that a skilled facilitator could get more ideas from them than I did.”

“……….There were just 4 participants in the discussion group, but in spite of this they all contributed actively and made a huge work. Firstly they were a bit unconfident, but during the discussion this problem was eliminated. ”

I think that IF discussion process revealed the peculiarities in content and procedure of discussion process about social issues in Georgia. First of all, students found [it] easier to think about policy possibilities and the ways of their implementation rather [than] to identify the major concern area. Why it happened so? To my mind, it happened because in transitional countries like Georgia people are much more concerned about social issues than in developed countries and it is very hard for them to identify which one is “the major” and which one is the “minor concern”.  Secondly, the discussion process revealed the “hottest” political issues in Georgia: existence of refugees from the conflict regions of Georgia.  Because of political reasons there are several hundred thousand of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from two breakaway regions of Georgia. One of the major concern[s] was the protection of human rights of IDPs.

After the reflection on the course I conducted using IF methodology, I have learned several lessons. First of all I believe that discussants should have a least one week before the next facilitation session. Students should have time for the reflection on previous facilitation session and writing the discussion summaries.  Otherwise they might find the IF discussion sessions tiring.  Despite the fact that students were interested to [learn] IF methodology, [the] course was quite demanding for them because we were conducting IF discussions almost every day.  [The] course itself required a lot of readings and writings (discussion summaries and discussion notes) every day. To give to the students “a little bit rest,” I decided [that] each student [would] facilitate only once a week.

Secondly, to my mind it would be much more useful to devote more time for the explanation of [the] IF Mission and IF discussion procedure than I did during the course.  Otherwise students might not understand the goals of facilitation sessions correctly.  I found they enjoyed be[ing a] facilitator more than to be a contributor of ideas. I think that they did not [at first] understand the role of facilitator. They thought that their job was to record the ideas on the flip-chart (especially it was so during their first facilitation sessions).  For the second facilitation session, situation changed: they enjoyed be[ing a] contributor of ideas more.

I also believe that it would be much more useful for students to lecture [to them first on] the topics that are directly related to the topic of discussion. I was lecturing the assigned topics from the syllabus that were not directly connected with the topic of discussion.  Of course it was about the social policy but not about the concern areas that were discussed during the particular discussion.

In general, teaching by using IF discussion methodology was helpful for me. I would like to admit that I personally gained a lot of knowledge from the students and from the teaching process itself because [the] IF discussion process improved my communication skills [and] enriched my understanding of teaching methods and the content of the course I teach.

And as I weathered this disquieting media and sensory onslaught from my poolside chair and tried to make sense of the on-air ramblings and various conspiracy theories of the type that I thought (or naively hoped) had last seen prominence in 1954 (thank you again, Joseph N. Welch), I was reminded at some point of the logical fallacy of the false dichotomy or the false choice.  This fallacy, which my spouse and I use regularly to great effect in our own arguments over household chores, incorrectly frames the question under discussion as a choice between only two given and mutually exclusive alternatives:  true or false, black or white, do the dishes or walk the dog, you’re either with us or against us.

Of course such dualism is often forced and—clearly when applied against me—quite obviously wrong.  There is nearly always at least a third option, if not a fourth or fifth or sixth.  I could do both:  wash the dishes and walk the dog.  Or —given my slothful proclivities—more likely do neither.

While further ignoring the clamor from both the TV and my nearly drowning progeny, it also occurred to me that the requirement in IF Discussion process of considering multiple possibilities (commonly 4-8) for a given topic is partly a direct and healthy deterrent to this all too common logical fallacy.

This isn’t to say that avoiding the false choice is necessarily easy—particularly in the heat of an argument.  We often want to frame our arguments to force a choice between the option we prefer and some clearly undesirable option or some slippery slope to that undesirable outcome.  This can take the form of we either we do it “my way” or we’ll inherently slide into some chaos.

Of course reality—and our fellow citizens (and family members)—just as often have a strong bias for multiple and alternative outcomes.  Perhaps the slippery slope will lead to a ski lift to the top of another hill with a better view or perhaps we’re already at the bottom and the all the options lead up, or perhaps we’ve got crampons and an ice axe and the whole point is to play on the slippery slope.  The point being that we shouldn’t necessarily accept the given options—almost always there are other possibilities.

Second, IF reports do not aim to solve any problems. Most policy reports are prepared in crisis situations to solve a specific and imminent problem. IF reports, on the other hand, give several different bird’s eye views of the conceptual landscape of an area of concern. They delineate the different concerns that people might have about them, the different conceptual policy possibilities for addressing them, their different possible implementations, and their different possible consequences. They are not stuffed with facts, numbers, and pictures intended to inform citizens about problems pertaining to our current policies. They are stuffed, instead, with different conceptual possibilities that are intended to provoke thoughtful discussion about an area of public policy concern. Each of these conceptual policy possibilities may raise their own special problems. But IF reports are not trying to solve their problems—they are simply trying to describe the different conceptual possibilities.

Third, IF reports are prepared by citizens for thoughtful public discussion among their fellow citizens. Most policy reports are prepared by policy experts for the purpose of advocating certain policy positions to policy makers. Our reports are prepared by two panels­¾one consisting of experts in the area of concern and the other of interested citizens¾for the purpose of engendering thoughtful public discussion of a wide range of contrasting conceptual policy possibilities for dealing with the area of concern. This discussion may include policy makers, but they are not our primary audience.

Fourth, IF reports describe fundamentally different conceptual policy possibilities. Consider, for example, IF’s report on Privacy & Privacy Rights. This report explores different policy possibilities that emanate from four different concepts of privacy: 1) privacy as liberty, or the right to be left alone; 2) privacy as autonomy, or the right to control one’s thoughts and actions; 3) privacy as property, or the right to own information about oneself; and 4) privacy as secrecy, or the right to keep information about oneself confidential. It recognizes that Americans think about privacy in each of these senses, and it does not treat any of them as the correct definition of privacy or more fundamental than the others.

Finally, IF reports aim at improving our public policy choices by stimulating discussion about these deep and fundamental conceptual differences. The United States is a very diverse country. People not only look differently from each other, they have different experiences, values, goals, beliefs, interests, and ways of thinking. Your next-door neighbors might feel very different about their privacy, property, food choices or regulation than you do. They may also have fundamentally different policy preferences. And the aim of our reports is to explore and develop these differences so we can understand them better and, ultimately, make policy choices that better fit our own values, goals, beliefs, and interests.

It was apparent from the outset that opinions on climate change represent a range of understandings of the science on the issue and of science itself. It also became apparent to me that this is one of those areas where belief and alignment with the polarized “sides” of the discussion often trumps helpful information and learning. Very little of the public discussion of the issue seems helpful to those trying to sort out policy possibilities and their possible consequences.

There are good reasons to work toward conceptual discussion of policy areas when the political passions of the day and the narrow focus on polar opposite solutions generate little more than circular debate. I believe it is important to understand the good faith arguments of the partisans of both sides (not the ditto-heads and talking point robots). I also believe it is important to create a “middle space” in which common ground may be explored and those who wish to work on solutions may do so in a reasoned way.

I recently facilitated my second public discussion of the policy possibilities developed by the web-based panel. The first discussion stuck pretty much to the possibilities as written, although participants did offer thoughts on what other possibilities might have been raised. The second public discussion was more consciously a developmental discussion where I let participants know I was looking to expand the possibilities with their assistance. A cooperating consulting group in Madison, Wisconsin recruited a panel of businesspeople and technical professionals who were interested in the topic.

The panel was well-suited for this task by temperament and experience. I was glad to find that while some participants leaned slightly one way or the other on climate change matters, the majority simply wanted to learn more. The discussions were respectful and thoughtful. The participants reviewed the prepared possibilities, critiqued them as helpful or not for discussion purposes, considered how those possibilities might be reframed or reorganized, and worked on two new possibilities that were geared toward presenting two contrasting policy approaches that question the need for action on climate change.

This probably will not win me any friends in Green circles, but let me report on a funny thing that happened on the way to these challenging perspectives. The sequence of discussion, with the participants making genuine efforts to understand why the original group developed the possibilities that it did, opened up discussion to the idea of having competing ideas on the table. It created rich space for discussion of “what is evidence”, “how is it weighed”, and “when is precautionary action called for”. It prompted discussion about which possibilities might lend themselves to modification or compromise. It also prompted discussion about various public reactions should one side or the other win a decisive political victory.

So aside from this recent discussion leading to expansion of the possibilities, it was helpful to me in showing how continued development of conceptual material can help prepare the public for the “give and take” that goes with most policy development. It seems to me this is one of the real arts of governance, especially on “hot button” issues.

When it comes to exploratory discussion, there are good reasons to pay diversity this sort of respect.  The most obvious is that there is absolutely no way we can avoid doing so: when we select participants, we are choosing some categories over others (indeed, a myriad of categories over a myriad of others).  So we might as well be self-conscious about which kind of diversity we are selecting for—i.e., whose participation we solicit.  There is simply no way to be “neutral” about recruiting.  Who will we invite: the college President or the store clerk?  The shut in or the member of the Rotary board?  I think it’s pretty clear that even a half-hearted commitment to democracy means answering such questions by making recruitment decisions that expand the circle of democratic discourse rather than retrace it.

A second important reason to respect diversity is that in exploratory discussions in particular “contrasting” kinds of people might be thought likely to contribute contrasting ideas—a good thing all other things being equal.

Still, it would be easy to push discursive respect for diversity too far.  Diverse participants are no guarantee of exploration; they may be good representatives, but not good listeners.  Second, there are serious limits to how much we can know about what kinds of diversity matter in different circumstances or on different topics.  Then there’s the problem of finding authentic representatives for those we think might matter the most.  Finally, at least in the small groups that are typical of IF discussions, there’s the very real practical problem posed by a limited number of seats.

What I think these considerations add up to is two rules of thumb:

(1)   add diversity to the participant mix where it widens the pool

(2)   don’t see diversity alone as a surrogate for exploratory discussion (which, as always, will depend more than anything else on your materials, your facilitation, and the disposition of your participants).

The goal of exploratory discussion is not to first locate and then provide a platform for any particular group, association, party, demographic, psychological profile, philosophical school, or Weltanshauung, but rather to go someplace new.  Diversity can help get you there, and has some democratic value of its own, but it doesn’t mean you’ve arrived .

This might be easier said than done, of course.  Most faculty are used to conducting discussions where they serve as an expert arbiter of right and wrong answers. And faculty are used to structuring discussions or lectures to lead toward pre-determined insights or lessons.  It’s another matter entirely to teach in a way that facilitates the discovery of something new and that fosters the social construction of divergent possibilities. To teach in such a way is to be comfortable with not knowing, to be comfortable with uncertainty about which way a discussion will go, and to be comfortable working with others to think of different ways forward.

To engage in such collaborative and exploratory discussions requires one to participate in a certain way, whether one is a teacher or a student. It requires that one act in a certain way, exhibiting a willingness to explore possibilities and generosity of spirit. It requires, in other words, certain kinds of virtue. How can we teach such behaviors? How can we instill such virtues? Students need to see them in action—and they need a chance to practice them. As Louis Menand remarks in his essay on “Re-imagining Liberal Education”:

The Deweyan answer to questions like these would be that you cannot teach people a virtue by requiring them to read books about it. You can only teach a virtue by calling on people to exercise it. Virtue is not an innate property of character; it is an attribute of behavior.

If a classroom is going to focus on student-centered discussion, then students need not only to be taught about what they might be doing and why—they’ll need to see it and experience it firsthand as they are engaged by their instructor. This is why students need to experience faculty demonstration and modeling of discussion facilitation as well as guided practice. Yet in higher education contexts, we’re not always so ready to provide such experiences. Menand notes that while “every progressive nursery school director” can tell you that students learn socially and learn by doing, “American higher education provides almost no formal structure, almost no self-conscious design, for imagining pedagogy in this spirit.”

The first focal point for faculty who’d like to engage in teaching student-centered discussions is their own behavior. What are the attributes that students will need to engage successfully in exploratory and developmental discussions? What are the behaviors of inquisitiveness, sympathy, open-mindedness, intellectual curiosity, and collegiality we’d like to see students exhibit in their student-centered discussions? Well these are the same attributes, the same behaviors that students will look to find in their instructors. Menand reminds us, “For those of us who are teachers, it isn’t what we teach that instills virtue; it’s how we teach. We are the books our students read most closely.”

–Jeff Prudhomme

One of the most widely appreciated rules of public discussion is the one that says “Everyone should get in on the conversation.”  Getting everyone involved is democratic; it also tends to enrich the discussion.  That goes double for exploratory discussions, in which the goal to cover a lot of ground.  Hearing from more voices increases the likelihood that the discussion will range widely, that exploration will actually find something.  So good facilitators know that a big part of their job is to mute the loud mouths and make sure quieter participants are heard from.

I believe that the same logic applies at one remove to choices about whom to include in civic or public discussion in the first place.  As facilitators, equality and exploration both direct us to level the playing field between individuals.  The same commitment to quality and exploration should likewise lead us as discussion organizers to seek to broaden participation in the civic conversation.

When you think back on key moments in your life, what would you say has influenced your development more—special books, or special persons?  When you think back on high school or college, which do you remember more—a particular class or a particular book you read?  Which do you turn to most frequently when you need guidance about an important decision—something you read or listen to, or someone you can talk with?

If you’re like most people, I suspect you answered these questions by saying that it’s certain people that make the difference in our development, our education, and our ongoing efforts to make our way in the world.  Teachers, mentors, and advisors, not texts, are what count.

This isn’t news to most of us, nor is it news to psychologists, scholars, teachers, or education reformers.  Teachers are the most important ingredient in educational success.  Good teachers explain why Finland has the world’s best public education system.

This matters to IF’s educational efforts, yes.  But it also matters to IF’s public discussions.  IF has put a lot of effort into developing “curricular” materials for public discussions.  More will be.  But even more important to the success of these discussions is the quality of the “teachers”—the facilitators—who organize and conduct them.  Schools can “enforce” attention to texts in a way that IF public discussion facilitators cannot.  Students have time for studying that citizens often lack.  Hence even the best discussion texts are likely to be forever limited in the degree they can contribute to IF’s public discussions.

What is likely to continue to matter more is the quality of our facilitators.  And here two abilities stand out: facilitators’ capacity to (1) recruit participants with a variety of perspectives and (2) be simultaneously responsive to participants’ interests and push them beyond their comfort zones.

Ask someone who’s participated in an IF public discussion and they’re likely to tell you “It’s the facilitator who made the difference.”