Teaching a Utopia? On the Conditions for Deliberative Discussion in Social Science Education

In light of the advent of post-truth politics, this PhD project set out to investigate the conditions for improving the democratic quality of student discussions in social science education. The project started out by discussing whether the ideal of deliberation can be used as an appropriate standard for assessing the quality of student discussions. It argued that this ideal can be seen as one marker of quality discussion among others if one employs definitions of quality, socialscience education, and deliberation that match each other. While matching definitions of the terms exist, there are also definitions that would render the concepts incompatible. Three different arguments for why deliberation might be seen as a kind of quality were advanced. The first asserted that teaching, which approximates deliberative ideals, is an instance of good, fair, and just teaching and hence valuable in itself. The second asserted that teaching, which approximates deliberative ideals, is an instance of successful teaching because it likely promotes desirable civic learning outcomes. The third asserted that teaching, which approximates deliberative ideals, is an instance of aligned teaching because it fits the core content, form, and purposes of social science education. The discussion of deliberation as a kind of quality underlined, moreover, that there are certain aspects of quality in social science education that are not captured by the notion of deliberation – particularly aspects related to students’ emotions and motivations for participation. Following the normative discussion, the project moved on to explore the empirical conditions for deliberative classroom discussion in its three articles.

Article I entitled “Contexts and prevalence of classroom discussion in Nordic Social Science teaching. A large N observational study” investigated the prevalence and contexts of classroom discussion in a Nordic sample of 375 teaching segments (each lasting 15 minutes). The sample was gathered through video observations, and discussion was measured by an element from the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (Grossman, 2021), which has also been used to structure observations of social science teaching (Christensen, A. S. & Mathé, 2023). While 147 (39.2%) of the investigated segments contained at least five minutes of discussion (considered as deliberative opportunities), discussion segments were very unequally distributed across classes. The article found classroom discussion to be most likely during small
group work, in the middle of a 45-minute lesson, and in schools with high achieving students. The findings made by article I suggest that there may be pronounced inequalities in opportunities for deliberation across social science classes in the Nordic countries, and that students in lowachieving schools might experience systematically fewer opportunities for deliberation than students in high-achieving schools. Since many of the investigated classes experienced no opportunities for discussion at all, the findings made by article I, moreover, suggest that many students are formally excluded from participating in processes of deliberative classroom discussion. An important limitation of the findings made in article I was that the investigated teaching segments were gathered through non-probability sampling and were hence not
representative of the larger population of Nordic social science teaching segments.

Article II entitled “Chasing deliberation in the Social Science classroom. A study of deliberative quality in whole-class, small group, and pair discussions” examined classroom discussion in three conditions: a whole-class condition, a small group condition, and a pair condition (different discussion settings). The article made use of video observations from a classroom intervention to evaluate how each condition affected the deliberative quality of the discussion process. To this end, it coded 585 student utterances for aspects of deliberation using the Stromer-Galley (2007) observation manual. The article found both the small group and pair conditions to promote key aspects of deliberation compared to the whole-class condition. The small group condition generated the highest levels of contestation and engagement, whereas the pair condition generated the highest level of equality. Article II’s findings, hence, suggested that the deliberative quality of classroom discussion may sometimes benefit from the absence of the teacher. It argued, moreover, that this might be especially true when students disregard the teacher’s authority or when past interactions between the students and the teacher have been troublesome. 

Article III entitled “Chasing deliberation in the Social Science classroom. A study of deliberative quality in factual and controversial issue discussions” investigated the deliberative quality of classroom discussion in three conditions: a factual issue condition, a controversial issue condition, and a scaffolded controversial issue condition. It used video observations from a classroom intervention to assess how each condition affected the deliberative quality of the discussion. To this end, article III identified 202 student utterances and coded them by use of the Stromer-Galley (2007) manual for measuring aspects of deliberation. Though the scaffolded controversial issue condition produced more argumentation, contestation, and engagement than the factual issue condition, the controversial issue conditions also opened the door to more inequality, exclusion, and chitchat. The results of article III, hence, suggested that reasoned classroom discussion might co-exist with problems related to inequality and exclusion, and that different conditions of discussion might promote different aspects of deliberation.

Articles II and III each used a single case experiment, which is a specific kind of classroom intervention design, to investigate whether specific micro conditions (classroom settings) can push opportunities for deliberation closer to realization. Here, the results showed that some conditions (such as scaffolding, a controversial topic, and a small group setting) can help promote the partial realization of deliberative opportunities. An important drawback, however, was that these conditions seemed unable to promote aspects of deliberation related to equality and inclusion. It is worth noting, moreover, that the findings were all subject to several limitations. The most serious of these was a lack of external validity, which implied that the findings could not readily be generalized to the larger population of Nordic social science students. Based on the empirical findings, the project makes two overarching conclusions. First, attempts at promoting deliberative discussion in Nordic classrooms seem to suffer from deficits with respect to equality and inclusion. From a deliberative point of view, these issues are severe, and more research and innovative practice is needed to counter them. Second, however, manipulating the micro conditions of classroom discussion can have a positive effect on the deliberative quality of such discussions. Social science teachers can, hence, use their role as designers of classroom discussion to improve the deliberative quality of discussions in social science education. In so doing, they can prepare their own students for future participation in democratic life and simultaneously improve the current quality of discussion in an important corner of the public sphere. In the right circumstances, social science teachers and students can, hence, together provide a little resistance to the powerful anti-democratic forces of our time.