“Once you understand our brains, it’s so clear that we need to learn how to talk to each other better,” says Professor Martin Carcasson, founder of the CSU Center for Public Deliberation.
Professor Carcasson was invited to UW by Special Assistant to the President, Martha McCaughey. His speaking event and subsequent workshops were part of an ongoing initiative to encourage free expression and civil dialogue on campus.
The events were sponsored by the President’s Office, SLCE, The Malcolm Wallop Civic Engagement Program, and BridgeUWYO: and featured workshops specifically for staff, faculty, and students.
When asked about his work, Carcasson said, “I work with universities, cities, libraries, newsrooms, all of these different places. I engage with how the systems work. Different institutions in any given place are all either undermining or improving in communication. I spent all this time running meetings but I had to take a step back and look at the institutions as a whole. We had this newspaper in Fort Collins and they killed their opinion portion. Losing that was a loss to our political system.”
Carcasson then went on to assist a local newsroom in applying for a grant. The grant allowed the start of his project. It has since expanded to Rocky Mountain Public Media, the Colorado Press Association, and 40 different newsrooms. They do workshops on training journalists in deliberative skills to best support deliberation and communication in society.
In the student workshop, Carcasson spoke on the impartiality of principles, “It’s a triangle. The top is impartiality, right trying not to have too much bias, or at least recognizing your biases, the bottom spokes are commitment to good information and commitment to democracy. So we have to try to balance the tension between the different parts. I work with educators, newsrooms, governments, and students, trying to teach them these skills.”
His overarching ideas in his research boiled down to four main points: democracy is hard and requires high-quality communication, these conversations are not natural, and two critical challenges face these conversations: toxic polarization and information disorder, and our need to build capacity in our communities.
Carcasson hoped with his student workshop to help students learn to research and communicate better, “This is a skill set that’s hugely important for students and also has such a big impact on your community.”
The next part of the workshop dove into facts and opinions. Facts, as Carcasson said, are not always perfect. Some facts can be terrible and lack credibility. On the other side, opinions can be well thought out and reasonable. He suggested the Toulmin model: facts, values, and policy claims. We must decide what is, what is favorable, and what we should do about it.
This went further to his points about credibility, adding that, “credibility has been redefined by a lot of people. People who agree with me are credible and facts that go against what I think aren’t. That’s how it’s defined now.”
The workshop finished with Carcasson asking all the attendees to do a deep dive into their values. “Most values are supported in broad form. When we start ranking them and interpreting them different, that’s where division happens”
“If you rank your values. Could you make a case against your top value? Could you make a case defending your least important value? Where do all of these ideas fall?
Professor Carcasson shared resources and additional insight with students, staff, faculty, and community members through the workshops and his speaking event. His goal was to help facilitate better engagement and dialogues on campus, an initiative that has been popular across many events this past year. As Carcasson said on its importance, “When we learn how to talk to each other, that’s how we get the engagement we need to do important things.”
