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Deliberative Pedagogy: Ideas for Analysing the Quality of Deliberation in Conflict Management in Education

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Abstract

Institutions worldwide respond to the need to recognise the value of educating children and young people to handle or solve conflicts in communication. But how do they or we know that an event is correctly interpreted as a conflict? How can people analyse the quality of deliberation when handling or solving conflicts in communication in education? I discuss these questions and argue that the notion of conflict cannot be defined only in terms of incompatibility, clash, opposition and/or disagreement; it also has to encompass negativity in the approach to the other. I also argue that the quality of deliberation can be analysed through a deliberative pedagogical approach, which takes into account structural features of deliberation and required dispositions of the participants, and that our knowledge of conflicts emerges holistically and is interpersonal and objective. I begin by giving an account of some institutional responses to conflicts. Then I discuss the notion of conflict and define it, inter alia, in terms of incompatibility, disagreement and negativity. Finally, I discuss ideas for analysing the quality of deliberation in communication when handling or solving conflicts in education.

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Notes

  1. Muhammeds ansigt (The Face of Mohammed). In Jyllands-Posten, Avisen, Kulturweekend, 30 September (2005), p. 3. The Iranian newspaper—Hamshahri—announced on the 6th of February 2006 that it is holding a contest on cartons on Holocaust as a response to the publishing of caricatures on Mohammed. The exhibition is hold August 19 to September 13, (2006) in an exhibition hall next to the Palestinian Authority’s embassy in Teheran with more than 200 cartoons about the Holocaust as a test of Western tolerance.

  2. See Byman (2002) for a discussion on ethnic conflicts, Borradori (2003) for excellent interviews of Derrida and Habermas on terrorism, EUMC (2003) for a report on racism and xenophobia in Europe, Feinberg (2006) for an important discussion on the role of religious schools in democratic education, Oetzel and Ting-Toomey (2006) for a valuable handbook on conflict communication, Smith (2003) for a discussion on violence in schools in Europe and Wallensteen (2006) for a discussion on conflict resolution in relation to war within and among nation-states.

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Correspondence to Klas Roth.

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“... the aim is not the absurd one of making disagreement and error disappear.” (Davidson 2001c, p. 153).

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Roth, K. Deliberative Pedagogy: Ideas for Analysing the Quality of Deliberation in Conflict Management in Education. Stud Philos Educ 27, 299–312 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-007-9069-8

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