tdaxp

"Congratulations on the abolition of the Parliamentary Republic and on the establishment of Direct Democracy!" Thus I ended my class today.

My Classes are Democracies and hold elections every week. I run my classrooms on a variant of the Iraqi model, with a proportionally-elected Assembly, a President chosen with 2/3rds of the Assembly, and a Prime Minister named by the President approved by half of the Assembly. I've played around with modifications of the design, but I enjoy starting off classes with the Assembly / President / Premier model of government.

The constitution can be modified by the Prime Minister presenting a proposal to the assembly, whereupon it must be approved by a 2/3rds vote. If so legislated, it must pass with a 2/3rds plurality in a plebiscite. The Constitution has been radically restructured before, and every time the variation has left the old infrastructure intact while some portion of it was changed. Once, a Supreme Court was established that could overrule the elected government at will, creating a Judicial Supremacist state. Another time, a Lebanese system of "confessions" was eneacted to parcel out different posts to different cliques. Thirdly, the Assembly was replaced with an "Assembly-of-the-Whole," with every student having one vote. And just last semester, an openly corrupt Prime Minister oversaw a series of fraudulent elections which created a very Medici feel to teaching.

But today, for the first time, the Republic itself passed into the world of memories and dreams.

I was going through some papers and posts, preparing for the next installment of The Wary Guerrilla, when I realized I had not posted a bibliography for my Classroom Democracy series. Throughout the series I cite chapters and journal articles but never state where I got them from. Thus, without further ado, my long occulted sources:

Bruning, R. (1995). The College Classroom from the Perspective of Cognitive Psychology. Handbook of College Teaching: Theory and Applications.

Dawson, J.D. (1996) Relations of mutual trust and objects of common interest. In J.K. Roth (Ed.) Inspiring Teaching: Carnegie Professors of the Year Speak. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, Inc. (pp. 44-53).

Halonen, J.S. (2002). Classroom presence. In S. Davis & W.Buskist (Eds.). The teaching of psychology: Essays in honor of William J. McKeachie and Charles Brewer. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. (pp. 41-55).

Ley, K. and Young, D. (1998). Self-Regulation Behaviors in Underprepared (Developmental) and Regular Admission College Students. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 1998, Vol. 23, 42-64.

Roth, J.K. (1996). What teaching teaches me: How the Holocaust informs my philosophy of education. In J.K. Roth (Ed.) Inspiring Teaching: Carnegie Professors of the Year Speak. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, Inc. (pp. 199-210).

Royse, D. (2001). The mental groundwork. In D. Royse (Ed.). Teaching Tips for College and University Instructors: A Practical Guide. Needham Heights, MA.: Allyn & Bacon. (pp. 1-24).

Ruiz, T.F.(1996). Teaching as subversion. In J.K. Roth (Ed.) Inspiring Teaching: Carnegie Professors of the Year Speak. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, Inc.(pp. 158-165).

Smith, K. (2006). "Representational Altruism: The Wary Cooperator as Authoritative Decision Maker," American Journal of Political Science, October 2006, Vol. 50 No. 4, pp 1013-1022.

Smith, K. et al. (2004). Evolutionary Theory and Political Leadership: Why Certain People Do Not Trust Decision-Makers. Presented at the 2004 Midwest Political Science Association Conference in Chicago, 2004, 1-42.

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Classroom Democracy, a tdaxp series
1. A Parliament of Scholars
2. A Defense of Republics
3. The Life of Constitutions
4. The Evolution of Learning
5. Bibliography

About two months ago I posted Learning Evolved, a series that focused on classroom management. However, unlike Classroom Democracy and Classrooms Evolved, L.E. focused on how students can keep each other in line if the professor is brave enough to super-empower peer pressure. (In this way, L.E. is closer to my series on The Wary Guerrilla than typical classroom management).

Very helpfully, Sean Meade directed me to "Community Node-Based User Governance (CNBUG): Applying Craigslist's Techniques to Decentralized Internet Governance" by Alice Goodmann of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. I hope to be able to use some of Goodmann's concepts, ideas, and (of course) sources in the semester ahead.

An excerpt:

Peer Production eschews the idea of a centralized Internet government, and instead lets individual users to govern the Internet on their own behalf, by enabling them to permit or block contact from other users. By controlling their personal exposure to informational flows, individual users exclude bad actors that contact them, while also lowering the danger of 'chilling' content on the Internet as a whole. In determining whether or not to permit a contact to reach a user, Peer Production usually relies on a ‘trust’ system, built on the recommendation of others that are somehow trusted to certify the value of a communication.

Thanks Sean!

Because of maddening and inferiority problems with my blog hosting service, a comment I wrote to Mark of ZenPundit did not go through. Mark had a question on deliberative learning over at my series, Classrooms Evolved, and as Mark was kind enough to link to those posts, I do not feel good letting him wait until blogspirit gets its act together. (That could, literally, take forever.)

My reply is below:

I've tried classroom democracy on community college students, gene. ed students in a survey course, and political science / international studies students in an introductory course. I think all three of these tries went better than a piagetian attempt or lecture-based attempts.

Students differed on motivation. Community college students and major students tended towards mastery orientation, with the major students taking the democracy itself as a system to master while community college students used it to help them master their technical skill. Thus the major students devised and implemented clever alternatives to the sort of democracy I layed out, while the community college students used it as a way to select tutors who would help other students in exchange for reduced assignments.

Gen. ed. students were generally performance oriented. Several times there were "coups" with a President or Prime Minister declaring his term extended -- students were focused mostly on grades and so such coups were popular (as they provided more continuity than elections in course structure).

Thus the directional nature of the classroom I describe in this series. I expect that by embedding the democracy within a curriculum you would have a more durable system for gen. ed. students, while still allowing major students the ability to play with the system if they want to.

I plan on handing out an edited version of this philosophy to students on the first day next semester. This system is designed for practical implementation.

Phil's question over at "Open Thread" is also still hanging, but Catholicgauze and Sean seem to have that covered. (I don't have the original text of my comment anymore, so I hope it stops being AWOL soon!)

We must liberate Political Science from the Barbarians.

Political scientists rarely apply the tools of political science to the problem of teaching political science. Instead, our poor field is oppressed by interlopers from psychology or economics. Students are naturally curious, the psychologists tell us, and so we should merely facilitate their natural desire to learn the materials. Or the Economists trot out their Rational Man, and tell us that our students are his clones: the student's must be forced to study by altering the utility function by punishing behaviors we dislike and rewarding the behaviors we enjoy. Everywhere these foreigner followers of the SSSM god teach us to ignore our ancient traditions and follow their strange ways.

No more! It is time for the colonized to become the colonizers! Our hammer and sickles and evolutionary analysis and wary cooperation theory. Let us rise up and seize the commanding heights our own field's future!
Political science is the study of social conflict and interpersonal interaction. Current research into genetic factors imply that certain traits are in-born, and I propose that these can be exploited for pedagogical ends. Humans are loss-avoiding, in-group-supporting, out-group-competing, cheater-punishing machines, and it is time we apply these facts to education. (I realize that the direction of this paper is separate from the week's focus on international relations and comparative politics, but I believe it is no less useful.)

An agile Constitution can be changed, so that the weaknesses can be fixed and not become avenues for anti-democratic forces. This is as true for the constitutions in Classroom Democracies as the constitutions in Federal Republics. Of my classes last semester, one added a Supreme Court, one established a Lebanon-style division of offices, and one abolished the Assembly.

1. The Supreme Court

Classroom Democracy builds rational academic behavior by exposing students to multiple perspectives through peer interaction. Different options, such as whether to spend a day watching a movie or studying for an exam, are considered by the students. Regular elections rewards students who have good study skills to share, and allows them to act as mentors for students who are not so knowledgeable. Democracy is very Vygotskian, as it relies on dialog and zones of proximal development.

However, social interaction can be stressful. It requires students to consciously weight alternatives, which is mentally more taxing than trusting an authority figure. When the teacher is dedicated to democracy, the students cannot revert easily to their role of passive receptacles of knowledge. One class, however, succeeded in doing just that...

One reason Classroom Democracy succeeds is the powerful human drive for socialization. "Students have a more enjoyable and profitable learning experience when they feel connected to each other," (Royse 6), and hands-on role-playing (11) such as classroom democracy enable this. Classroom democracy succeeds because it is founded on social interaction, and "the most successful programs for developing critical thought have been those involving social interaction" (Bruning 4).

The innovative nature of classroom democracy makes this doubly true, as its unusual processes challenge "established orthodoxies" (Ruiz 159) and force students to be aware of how they learn and how they want to learn. Socialization encourages students to develop "self-regulation [to] use personal (self) processes to strategically monitor and control his or her behavior and the environment" (Lee and Young 32). Whatever we would wish, many college students do not develop study skills because they are never given any control of their learning in a classroom environment. Classroom democracy allows students to develop self-regulation in a Vygostkian, zones-of-proximal-development, style by working with more established learners in deciding how to learn.

My Classes are Democracies and hold elections every week.

Through these elections an Assembly, a President, and a Government are selected.
First, every student votes for an Assembly. The Assembly is elected through proportional parliamentary representation, so that a student who receives one vote from the class has the ability to cast one vote in the Assembly, a student who receives two has the power to cast two, and so on.



Secondly, the Assembly elects a President. The President is chosen by a two-thirds vote of the Assembly....