James Madison University’s James Madison Center for Civic Engagement and the National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI) invite colleges and universities to apply to the inaugural cohort of Centers for Civic Life and national faculty fellows program, engaging campuses in deliberative dialogue for improving civic discourse and free speech. This is a four-year program funded through a U.S. Department of Education - Funds for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education grant.
Deliberation—the process involving reflecting and weighing preferences, values, and interests to find common ground to act on public issues—is a cornerstone of democratic societies. As a compliment to campus free speech and dialogue across divide efforts, deliberation provides students opportunities to share perspectives and reason together about wicked issues, having to talk about actions they could pursue, the real tradeoffs to those actions, and what they would accept to meaningfully address the issue. Deliberation’s value lies in cultivating habits of perspective-taking, active listening, and “choicework” even when agreement remains elusive. Empirical scholarship affirms that participation in NIFI-style deliberative forums enhances listening and reasoning skills and improves intellectual humility while reducing polarization.
The revitalized Centers for Civic Life program, a long time program supported by the National Issues Forums Institute for developing deliberation hubs at institutions of higher education, will ground campuses across the nation in deliberative dialogue, offering training in deliberative pedagogy and naming and framing issues for public deliberation, robust assessment specific to deliberation, as well as funds to implement deliberative forums on campus and support for a faculty fellow who will lead the effort and develop new nonpartisan issue guides on the nation’s most pressing problems for universities across the nation to use.
This program builds on the Better Conversations Together deliberation program at James Madison University, which has embedded deliberation as a required component of the first-year student experience using campus-specific NIFI-style issue guides.
This program provides $5,000 of funds for the development of a deliberative center on campus as well as $14,000 for the time and effort of a faculty fellow from each institution ($5,000 per semester plus $4,000 for summer support) to develop issue guides and convene deliberations on their campus.
Applications for the 2026-2027 cohort will be live on May 1st and close May 29th. Application materials can be submitted here. Please see the below FAQ for more information.
Frequently Asked Questions
This program funds the development of a deliberative center on campus as well as the time and effort of a faculty fellow from each institution.
Fellows will spend a year in cohort exploring deliberative pedagogy, naming and framing, deliberation assessment strategies, and deliberative facilitation methods, culminating in the revision of a current NIFI deliberative issue guide and the development of a new issue guide for campus-based public deliberation. These issue guides will be published and made available for national use in K-12 and higher education settings.
Two in-person meetings – one at the beginning of the fellowship hosted by the University of Delaware and the other at the JMU Washington DC Center in May – will allow fellows to deeply engage with each other and with pedagogy and issue guide development. Fellows will meet monthly over Zoom to discuss issue guide development progress and for conversations about deliberative pedagogy.
Faculty Fellows will receive a total stipend of $14,000 for the year, $5,000 per semester and a summer stipend of $4,000. Travel costs to the two required convenings will be covered by JMU. Each campus will receive $5,000 to support deliberation efforts cross-campus and the use of the fellows issue guide.
Faculty from all disciplines and those who are not on the tenure track or pre-tenure are eligible to apply. Faculty from a range of institutions, including regional publics, community college, religiously affiliated, and private universities are all eligible to apply.
Prior experience with deliberation is not required.
- Commitment letter from Provost or university president indicating commitment to support campus-wide deliberation efforts developed by the Faculty Fellow.
- Support letter from supervisor, department chair or academic dean supporting the faculty’s time commitment to the Fellowship.
- CV
- Cover letter outlining interest in Centers for Civic Life and Faculty Fellowship program and professional learning goals
- May 1: Application form open
- May 29: Application review
- June 12: Notification of acceptance
- August 1: First cohort meeting via Zoom
- October 28-29: In person convening at University of Delaware
May 2027: In person convening at JMU Washington D.C. Center
A short list of potential issue guides can be found here. This is just a suggested list of issues and topics that fellows can choose from. The October in-person meeting will allow for discussion and refining of specific topics for new issue guides. Fellows will also choose one guide from NIFI’s current catalog of issue guides to update and reframe.
Not sure what a NIFI issue guide is? Take a look at the catalog of past issue guides to see!
Faculty Fellows will be required to submit the following:
- Draft action plan for campus deliberative forums in October 2026
- Updated issue guide framing draft in December 2026
- Issue guide research in January 2027
- Issue guide draft in March 2027
- Updated issue guide framing final draft in May 2027
- Final issue guide draft in June 2027
- Assessment data from campus deliberative forums in June 2027
NIFI pioneered the concept of naming and framing of issues for public deliberation. Over their 45 year history, NIFI has engaged communities across the country in identifying the ways neighborhoods and cities are talking about the issues that matter most, identifying the values underneath the way people are talking, and using those values to frame issues for deliberation.
Naming issues begins with convening people who are experiencing or invested in the issue to gather their concerns. This can coincide with academic and public research about the issue. Naming needs to identify a real, unresolved public tension and not just a concern and must be shared among a diverse set of people. After gathering a diverse set of concerns, the author can start to identify the values or “things held most valuable” by people discussing the issue and craft approaches for acting on the issue that address that specific value. Approaches, or frames, should respond to a core public concern and answer “given this issue, what should we do?” For each approach, the frame will have 4-5 different actions that individuals and communities could take to address the issue. The approach will also list several drawbacks or real, intrinsic downsides to taking that approach to address the issue.
Campuses in the Centers for Civic Life program have engaged in naming and framing exercises within their communities, sometimes even within classrooms as a culminating project. These localized issue guides are available on the NIFI website as examples of campus-led naming and framing efforts.
- Assessment support and data analysis for deliberative forums conducted on their campus
- All design and publishing work for new and revised issue guides
- Ongoing support for researching and framing an issue for campus-based deliberative forums
- A Community of Practice with monthly meetings supporting learning deliberative pedagogy, facilitation strategies, and assessment
