From debate to dialogue: Toward a pedagogy of nonpolarized public discourse

Abstract

This essay describes the rationale, content, and structure of a team-taught course which explored the difference between debate and dialogue as forms of public discourse. Our the-sis is that the value of public argument in our culture is undermined by its tendency to polarize popular opinion, and that this situation could be improved by the development of a pedagogy of dialogue to balance our discipline’s traditional emphasis on debate. The essay is divided into four sections. The first section examines our discipline’s view of argu-ment. The second section explores the question of dialogue’s “teachability, ” and the third section proposes several fundamental components of a pedagogy of dialogue. The final section describes the format of the team-taught course that the authors designed to explore the comparative benefits of debate and dialogue as forms for public discourse. T he limitations imposed upon public deliberation by our culture’s predisposition to address issues through polarized discourse—i.e., debate—were never so clear as in the televised hearings of the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives, when in December 1998 it took up the question of President’s Clinton’s proposed impeachment. The hearings were a striking manifestation of the phenomenon addressed by Deborah Tannen in her recent book, The Argument Culture: Our determination to pursue truth by setting up a fight between two sides leads