In October 2011, as the mud of the upcoming American presidential campaign was only beginning to be slung, rookie Wabash rhetoric professor Sara A. Mehltretter Drury was reading a textbook written by the late W. Norwood Brigance H’59. It wasn’t her first Brigance text; she’d read the work of the College’s most famous speech professor in graduate school, and her advisor, J. Michael Hogan, had spoken at the Brigance Colloquy hosted by the Wabash Department of Rhetoric two years earlier.
But reading Brigance’s book at the College of this man who’d been such a fierce advocate for speech training “to promote the welfare of a free society,” Drury recognized an even deeper connection to her own work in what her discipline calls deliberation.
“He’s not always using the term deliberation, but he is absolutely talking about the process,” Drury says. “He talks about how we need to train college students to go into communities and talk about public problems, weighing the pros and cons of each issue, understanding there are different solutions.”
Deliberation, as Drury and her colleagues in rhetoric define it, is the process of working through public issues using facilitated small-group conversations, leading to public choice-making. Deliberation incorporates both expert evidence and personal experience into civil public conversation directed toward solving a community’s problems.
“In rhetorical studies right now there’s a real emphasis on civic engagement,” Drury says. “That’s not a new emphasis—certainly there are aspects of this in Greek rhetorical theory. But it’s also been at the heart of the field of what was called speech communications since its beginnings, and here we remember that very well through W. Norwood Brigance.”
The Wabash Rhetoric department hosts the annual Brigance Forum lecture—which last year focused on how school boards use deliberation to build trust. In February 2014, the department will host the third Brigance Colloquy, this time focusing on public discourse and civic engagement across the liberal arts. The department also re-oriented the Baldwin Oratorical Contest to focus on student speeches that address the theme “Practicing Civic Engagement.”
Drury’s arrival at the College in 2011 and her research on deliberation added momentum to the Brigance Revival. She was fresh off a research fellowship with the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, OH, whose focus is the question, “What does it take to make democracy work as it should?”
“The Foundation tries to see how communities can come together through the process of deliberation and find ways to solve their pressing public problems,” Drury says. “It moves the public conversation toward a collaborative exchange of ideas and possibly policy actions, rather than a pro and con debate over a particular policy.” The Wabash Rhetoric Department’s “Tough Choices” speech in Rhetoric 101 is a way of integrating deliberation into public speaking. In doing so, Drury says, “We’re one of the few places that has thought about linking the basic public speaking course to deliberation.”
For Drury, part of learning to speak is learning to listen.
She tells her students, “Deliberation doesn’t mean you’re saying, ‘I’m leaving the things I care about at the door’; it means you’re saying, ‘I bring the things I care about to the table because I’m a member of the community, but I also need to listen to what you bring to the table.’
“Debate has an important place in society, but I want deliberation to have a place, too. There are moments where advocacy is critical, but there are also moments when we need more communal processes like deliberation. It isn’t a magic wand—it doesn’t make everyone sing a civic version of ‘Kumbaya.’ But if it’s done well, it can reshape a conversation.”
To that end, Drury taught an upper-level theory course on researching deliberation and rhetoric. She is also teaching A Gentleman and a Citizen: Engaging the Liberal Arts, Community, and Profession, a freshman tutorial that asks: What does it mean to be a Wabash Gentle-man and Citizen, living the Gentleman’s Rule in college and after you graduate? How can we better discover and discuss the most pressing problems facing our communities? And what are viable ways of improving our communities, right now, and for the future?
And this November the department, in partnership with the Kettering Foundation, will host a community forum, inviting Montgomery County citizens to use deliberation to discuss the local impact and solutions for substance abuse, a problem rhetoric faculty and students chose to focus upon after meeting with local leaders. Wabash students facilitate these conversations, along with some Wabash faculty and staff.
Drury continues her own work with the Kettering Foundation, involving Wabash students in that research through a joint-learning agreement between the Foun-dation and the College. Last spring, six students helped Drury design a study to find out if Wabash students are developing skills in deliberation, now that it is taught in Rhetoric 101.
“It’s been a great experience for the students, and a challenging one,” Drury says. “Our research design was certified by Wabash’s Institutional Review Board, we worked collaboratively to develop the proposal, and they are 100% co-designers of the study.
“This is rare for undergraduates, but I had collaborative mentors my entire undergrad and graduate career, and I’m excited to have the chance to share that experience with my students.”
The students are enthusiastic, too. Seton Goddard ’15, Jeremy Wentzel ’14, and Derek Andre ’16 spent a month last summer analyzing results from the focus groups they ran the previous semester. Then they presented their preliminary results in Dayton to college and university faculty researchers at a Kettering Foundation Research Exchange meeting.
“The people we met were excited to talk with us about the research that we had done,” Goddard says. “Not to ‘toot our own horns’ too much, but it was evident that our work impressed our fellow participants.”
Andre found the summer a humbling experience.
“I became much more adept at analyzing texts, but I also gained a much greater appreciation for the research process,” says the Wabash sophomore, who is working again with Drury this academic year.
Drury says the students “represented Wabash very well, and they had the opportunity to meet people doing research on democracy from around the globe.
I was thrilled to have them experience the satisfaction of receiving good feedback from other scholars—many of whom are college and university faculty—on our deliberation research.”
In July, Drury received notification she is receiving a second Joint Learning Agreement with the Foundation to support her research in deliberation and teaching. She’s making plans for student interns next summer and more interaction with collaborators through Kettering.
That interaction last summer made a strong impression on Goddard.
“We heard from a professor in Israel who is researching the use of deliberation in discussing issues unique to Israel, and a scholar from Russia who is making similar attempts,” Goddard says. “I think we all walked away with an understanding of the important role that deliberation can have in all areas of academia, communities, and our world.”
Thanks to such realizations and the work of Drury and her colleagues in the rhetoric department, Wabash carries Brigance’s mission of speech training “to promote the welfare of a free society” into the 21st century, a time that needs it more than ever.