Project

DELIBERATE is a consortium research project “Education for deliberation: Practices of inquiry in dialogue-based democratic education”, funded by the Research Council of Finland for the period of 9/2024-8/2028.

The main objective of the project is to create a novel, elaborated, and practicable understanding of the practice of deliberation in democratic education. The research group contributes to tackling a burning challenge of contemporary democracies and is motivated by the following three observations (substantiated in more detail below): first, the most vital model for future democracies involves robust deliberative elements; second, deliberative democracy cannot survive or develop without democratic education; and third, current theoretical views and pedagogical approaches to deliberation in education are fatally deficient. The project addresses the serious lack of an adequate theoretical framework for education for deliberation and a related lack of the kind of pedagogical practices that would best support deliberative democracy. The project will approach the task from theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical angles to produce and implement a multi-perspective, research-based conception of the educational advancement of capacities for deliberation.Ā 

In order to achieve its main objective, the project combines three intertwined lines of research: (1) it explores the school teachersā€™ views and experiences to find out how and to what extent students are trained in the principles and practices of moral and political deliberation (empirical dimension; Subproject 1, University of Turku), (2) it develops the theory of deliberation in the context of education by utilizing the resources from philosophical pragmatism (theoretical dimension; Subproject 2, University of Oulu), and (3) it studies and develops classroom practices of democratic deliberation as a community of dialogic-philosophical inquiry (CPI) pedagogy (pedagogical dimension; Subproject 3, Tampere University).

The project is based on the premise that deliberation in education is best understood in the framework of philosophical pragmatism as habits for engaging in the practices of dialogic inquiry, involvingĀ both cognitive and emotional capacities for dealing with conflicts.

Deliberative democracy, to put it simply, stresses public reflection and dialogue as the justification and support for a political system in opposition to aggregative models in which the decision-making mechanism is a straightforward majority vote based on individual or group interests. Deliberative democracy requires a particular kind of education, as citizens need the skills and dispositions that are central to participating in public reflection. A major problem for current educational theory and practice regarding deliberation is the eclecticism and fragmentation of the research field.

On one hand, there is a lack of an articulated and coherent understanding of the nature and foundations of deliberation that would integrate educational philosophy and empirical research. On the other hand, many views from political theory have been adopted without critically examining the specific nature of deliberative endeavors in the context of education. For example, the philosophical critique of the consensus-oriented nature of deliberative theory cannot directly be applied to the educational context, where the goal of deliberative practices is not consensual agreement on political decisions but rather, the development of learnersā€™ capabilities of deliberation and judgment. Or, the widely discussed problematic aspects of deliberative theory, such as the overemphasis of rationality and disregarding emotional or power issues, are undoubtedly important, but fundamentally different in educational contexts, where the socio-emotional dimensions are immediately evident (while theoretically underdeveloped) and, depending on the educational setting, can foster or hinder the possibilities of learning. These differences and conceptual difficulties need to be considered profoundly in theorizing education for deliberation and developing practical pedagogical approaches. All in all, theoretical ambiguities, unintentional conflation of political and educational issues, and the disconnection between theory, empirical research, and pedagogical development have led to unstructured and non-cumulative research in this field.

The DELIBERATE research team, with its multidisciplinary expertise, long-term experience, and strong networks within this specific research area has been designed particularly to find solutions to these complex problems both at the level of current international scientific discussion and at the level of renewing current pedagogical practices in Finland.