Location: WAC Home > Events & News >   Author: Bonnie Smith Description: In his Comm-B course, The Jury Project, Professor David Fleming asks, "What is the educational project of a democracy? How do we teach students to be thoughtful, engaged citizens?"   Training Citizens to Deliberate and Decide: A Profile of David Fleming’s Jury Course   What is the educational project of a democracy? How do we teach students to be thoughtful, engaged citizens? These are questions that David Fleming, a professor in the Composition & Rhetoric area of the English Department, has been asking for years. And in the academic year of 1999-2000, Fleming was awarded the unique opportunity of a Lilly Fellowship, which allowed him to design a new Comm-B course and work with other UW professors who were designing new curricula. The course that eventually became Fleming’s “Jury Project”—a Bascom seminar in the English department ¾is an attempt to address the crucial questions above. The Jury Project: Filling Three Specific Needs The Jury Project evolved out of what Fleming perceived as three specific needs. First, Fleming has long been concerned with the ways that the academy tends to separate courses in writing from courses in reading, speaking and listening. In an essay on the Jury Project course, he has written about the frustrating way “‘languaging’ has been seen so separately from thinking; the way the general skills of the first two years of higher education have been divorced from the content and theory of the majors; the way the knowledge of those disciplines have been separated from ‘real world’ practice, purposes and values; and, finally, the way the individual so ‘developed’ has been alienated from his or her own community.” In the Jury Project, Fleming seeks to blur the lines forming these troubling disruptions between skill and content. A second problem Fleming wanted his new course to address was the ways in which politics are handled in the classroom. Politics, Fleming believes, are viewed as an “attempt to make the classroom into space for revolution,” which, he maintains, can become too dramatic. Or, politics are seen as a spectator sport, which Fleming views as entirely too tame. A way to deal with political issues without making students feel like they had “to go to the barricades” would involve coming up with a more mundane, everyday way to think about political life and action. And third, the very real, indescribably horrific events at Columbine High School in April of 1999 seemed to add a sense of urgency to the need to give young people an opportunity to deal with conflict, and, as Fleming says, “to live in a world where people are different and not to kill them.” Fleming notes that the boys who planned and executed the massacre at Columbine were given multiple opportunities to express themselves in writing classes; they had both written essays describing themselves carrying out violent acts, and they had both produced video documentaries about murders. After the massacre at Columbine, David Broder and others commented on how effective an exercise like the mock trial could be for dealing with conflict and then resolving it. But the mock trial itself wasn’t an entirely satisfying option for Fleming: “Broder and others had spent too much time thinking about lawyers¾not jurors,” Fleming decided. Many in the field of rhetoric have noted that the jury is the only form of direct, deliberative democracy we still have. So, really, Fleming concluded, a primary goal of our educational system is to train good jurors. The Jury Project in Action One particularly revealing detail about Fleming’s vision of the class itself is that he specifically wanted the course to take place around a very big table. He had to jump through some bureaucratic hoops to make that spatial detail a reality, and he has been extremely gratified to observe that it is around this big table where the actual work of the course gets done. In the Jury Project, students and teacher occupy the same space, share the same topic, and mull over the same resources. During the fifteen weeks of the semester, “jurors” grapple with the details of three cases. Fleming and his jurors select real cases, often from the Supreme Court docket, or they look at mock cases from the Georgetown University Street Law project, and he assembles the course readers by downloading briefs from the public domain of the web. All of the cases are actual problems¾not abstract controversial issues like the death penalty or gun control. In the past, two of the cases jurors have considered includeSupreme Court case Ferguson v. City of Charleston (regarding urine testing and the privacy rights of pregnant women) and Gratz v. Bollinger (a case on the affirmative-action policies at the University of Michigan which has been at the federal district and appeals levels). As a result of the actual and temporal nature of these specific problems, jurors must arrive at a solution¾even if only it’s only temporary. Fleming and the jurors in his course deal together with the complexity of the law and of the cases; nothing is open and shut, jurors often change their minds, and many in the course agonize over the vote they will eventually cast. Student-jurors make oral and written statements and arguments throughout the course of the semester. For one assignment, they are to write succinct, neutral representations of only one side’s stance. Another assignment involves writing a one-page synthesis map diagramming all the main arguments of the entire case. Student-jurors also acquaint themselves well with the case’s complexities by writing an analytical dialogue in which two imagined interlocutors go back and forth about how to handle a particularly vexing sub-issue of the case. And in yet another assignment training students to think carefully and responsibly about how their views are tied to the facts of the case, student-jurors make ten-minute oral arguments during which they present the very strongest position they can imagine. Deliberation: The Heart of the Jury Project The work of deliberation, though, is clearly the aspect of the course with which Fleming is most delighted. During deliberation week, student-jurors are arguing and reasoning together, and, it seems, looking more and more like the thoughtful, engaged citizens he wants them to be. As a professor, Fleming remains very hands-off during these crucial weeks of the course, and he remains committed to keeping his own position on the case under lock and key. “I try to be as open-minded as I want them to be,” he says. Rather than advocate for one side or the other, Fleming plays the referee and steps in when students seem to be talking past each other. If the tide is turning too much in one direction, he’ll step in and remind the jurors of something they’ve forgotten. “He used writing to think!” After deliberations, jurors vote, and the majority rules. This activity sounds uncomplicated, but, in reality, it’s far from easy. Sincerely invested in the decision they have to make and more aware of the ethical ramifications of their verdict, student-jurors (sometimes near tears) agonize over their vote. Following the vote, student-jurors write formal opinions for their final papers in the class, papers that Fleming maintains are among the very best student-writing he’s had in any of his courses. The papers are detail-rich and extremely precise since everyone in the Jury Project knows the facts of the case so well. One student changed his mind as a result of writing this formal opinion. “He used writing to think!” Fleming says proudly. Discourse: A Solution in Itself Further sources of pride for Fleming are the facts that he has received the highest course evaluations of his career, the majority of students never miss a single day of class (no one has ever skipped on voting day), and students tell him the course is fun. Ann Patten, a senior Biology major, commented that “the Jury Project showed me that I wielded considerable power as a jury member, and I was able to affect the conclusions our jury reached.” And Matt Kebbekus, a Legal Studies major, remarked, “What has stuck with me the most from the Jury Project is the importance of discourse. A number of my classes deal with the problems facing our modern society; I have consistently argued that effective discourse is a solution in itself. . . I wrote the best papers of my college career in Fleming’s class [and] I even convinced my advisors to include the class in the [Legal Studies] major.” Fleming is adamant in reminding all of us that this course is not about the jury; neither is it a course to train lawyers. And it’s not a course about the law. “The point of the class,” Fleming insists, “is that the law, politics, and the details of democracy belong to us.”