Ideas

IDEA #10: Talking Perspectives: Stakeholder Summit

“Perspective taking helps to build great empathy and understanding [and] helps [students] to understand the complexity of all the issues involved.” ⁴

Learning Intention

“One of the best ways to [think critically] is to try and see our assumptions and actions from multiple, and different, points of view.” ²

Overview

Beyond providing students with articles or resources from more than one side of an issue,² you can more directly engage students in questioning perspectives by having them participate in a task summit. Challenged with needing to make decisions or argue a policy from the perspective of various stakeholders encourages them to consider values and interests that may differ from their own and appreciate the complexity of issues they may have previously considered simple.²

Instructions

• Preview a task. Use a video clip, real world example, course readings, or current event coverage to provide background and set the stage for a decision to make. Environmental science students might be asked to participate in a policy debate; political science students might negotiate a trade agreement or treaty; history students might write the roadside monument marker for a historic location.
• Assign stakeholder roles. You might engage students in brainstorming a list of stakeholders, then let students self-select or do random assignments (draw out of a hat). For an added challenge, have students choose a stakeholder or side, and then require them to argue the opposite.
• Explore background on each stakeholder group or ideological perspective. In environmental science, students might look at environmental groups, corporate interests, local citizens, and policy makers; in a political science class, stakeholders might include various nations with interests or outcomes tied up in a specific country's politics; history students might explore various people or organizations who care about the event or figure being marked (park managers, local citizens, descendants of the historical figure/event).
• Perform the task. Students participate in a summit of stakeholders to make a decision from within their assigned stakeholder role. They may choose to walk out of the process but must justify their decision and articulate how the outcome is affected by their absence.
• Encourage reflection. After the task is complete, ask students to reflect on the process. Whose voices were most prominent? Which stakeholder roles were missing? What happened if/when a stakeholder refused to cooperate? How might the results play out if the plan was implemented?

Considerations

• Be prepared with roles, rules, or other elements that expedite setting up the activity.
• Allow enough time for full implementation and debriefing.
• Extend the reflection to a follow-up assignment to complete outside of class.

References