Page 247 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

roles that ranged from serving as a guide to those who were new to the process, injecting thoughtful

questions into the dialogue and sharing their own personal experiences with race and racism.

The National Issues Forum (NIF) (2013) advises that some roles of dialogue moderator or

facilitator include providing overview of the deliberation process, asking probing questions about

what is at stake in each issue and each option, encouraging participants to direct their questions

and responses to one another, and remaining neutral. The issue of neutrality by facilitators or

moderators evokes differing opinions from scholars and experts in the practice of civic and

deliberative dialogue. This was not the case in the first Albany CC event as it was mostly lecture.

The first Albany Community Conversation was well attended but it lacked genuine group

dialogue which I found disappointing since it was named and promoted as a “Community

Conversation”, despite Albany’s Mayor and Police Chief being present, the first CC event only

had one presenter who lectured the full length of time about what ‘Implicit Bias’ was and while

educational on its impact on society, again unfortunately, there was no participant discussion of it.

This to me was totally opposite of what a Community Conversation was meant to be –

involved participation and dialogue from members of the community. The dominant lecture

seemed as described by Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1998), a “banking” assumption that

an expert lecture “deposits” knowledge to the audience, who then store or “bank” that knowledge.

The intention of a group or a host entity putting together a Community Conversation is to

serve a cause of betterment and promote community involvement so kudos for everyone involved

in doing that. The remaining three Albany CC events were more aligned to the principals of civic

engagement where deliberative group dialogue and public direct participation in a real dialogue

took place as true Community Conversations ought to model, so this experience was good to reveal

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