Deliberative Pedagogy in a Nonmajors Biology Course: Active Learning That Promotes Student Engagement With Science Policy and Research

There has been growing attention to the need to shift from primarily lecture-based teaching to more active learning pedagogies in introductory science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classrooms. It has also been suggested that instructional content needs to shift to better prepare students to make connections between scientific facts and concepts and the contexts in daily life and policy making where an understanding of those concepts are required. Changes like these have been shown to promote increases in student engagement and knowledge retention. Deliberative democracy, a consensus model of decision making, has been used in real-life policy making involving controversial, science-related issues to increase citizen participation and engagement. Here, we describe a pedagogical approach based on this model implemented in a large, lecture-based, nonmajors introductory biology course at an urban public university. Results of student surveys and content retention tests show that this approach was effective in increasing student engagement and learning. This model has the potential to be expanded across STEM disciplines and in a variety of classroom and institutional contexts.