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Campus Partners Equip Teens with Skills to Tackle Complex Issues
VWU’s Robert Nusbaum Center connects TCA and graduate students through deliberative dialogue training.
University News | July 22, 2025
For many rising high-school students, summer means a break from school. But for a group of motivated students at Tidewater Collegiate Academy (TCA), this summer brought an opportunity to lean into leadership by learning how to listen.
Every year TCA, Virginia Wesleyan’s on-campus lab school, hosts the Global Scholars Leadership Academy summer camp, where students learn to lead while enjoying the fun of camp activities.
This year’s camp, held July 14 through 17, offered something new: a weeklong partnership with the Robert Nusbaum Center focusing on the power of deliberative dialogue.
Deliberative dialogue is one tool the Nusbaum Center uses to promote a more civil society. By educating students and community members, the Center encourages respectful dialogue and helps find common ground across differences to address complex issues.
Dr. Craig Wansink, the Joan P. and Macon F. Brock, Jr. Director of the Robert Nusbaum Center, and Kelly Jackson, the Center’s Associate Director, met with the students throughout the week. The students learned how to engage in, and lead, deliberative dialogues through various activities and observations.
Morgan Lee, a rising ninth-grader at TCA, said it was exciting to get an inside look at the work of the Nusbaum Center. “We were able to see how they use the dialogue,” she said, “to create new forms of communication and be able to bring people together—not just find common ground and not argue with each other.”
Initially, students dived into the difference between debate, discussion, and deliberative dialogue through interactive drawing activities. They also explored how each person’s values—like justice, security, and equality—can influence the way they engage with tough issues.
On Wednesday, the TCA students had the opportunity to observe and evaluate Dr. Clair Berube’s graduate-level VWU class, EDUC 530 Cognitive and Child and Adolescent Development. In that session, the Nusbaum Center team led the graduate students in a deliberative dialogue on the use of ChatGPT.
As their final assignment of the week, TCA students moderated a full deliberative dialogue using the National Issues Forums’ Issue Guide on Immigration, with their parents as participants.
The students led the session by following the deliberative dialogue structure that they’d learned: how to engage with complex, sometimes divisive issues—not to debate, but to seek understanding.
“We were really able to communicate in a different way”
As a lab-school, TCA partners with VWU to provide a place for professors and university students to interact, do research, develop curricula, volunteer, and train pre-service teachers.
“So few universities have anything like a lab-school on their campus,” Dr. Wansink said. “VWU faculty and students are so fortunate to have opportunities to work with educators who engage young students in such creative, meaningful, and results-oriented ways.”
Dr. Wendy Scott, Founder and Director of TCA, said TCA strives to develop global citizens equipped with 21st-century skills who are ready to make the world a better place.
“We don't want kids just to graduate with a diploma,” she said. “We really want them graduating with a sense of purpose and passion to contribute to their community, to their family. The deliberative dialogue is such a great opportunity for the kids to realize how they can use strategic thinking and their communication skills to make the world better.”
By teaching deliberative dialogue, Dr. Scott said TCA is “trying to empower the kids that they have agency in being part of some solutions or resolutions in their communities.”
Participant Morgan Lee said she liked the training. “We were really able to communicate in a different way, besides just debating,” she said. “Being able to become better friends through finding new ways to handle arguments and learning how to resolve them was very important to us.”
Beyond the classroom sessions, the overnight camp allowed the students to live on campus for a week, stay up late interacting, and create endless memories. “It was really fun,” Lee said. “We were able to see where we could be in the future.”
This year’s Leadership Academy turned out to be a unique collaboration that brought together three distinct components of the campus: the Robert Nusbaum Center, VWU’s Graduate Program in Education, and TCA.
Yet VWU and TCA’s partnership goes well beyond the classroom, supporting a learning environment for students of all ages. In addition to collaborations with the Nusbaum Center, the partnership has included Dr. Kathy Merlock Jackson’s Children, Teens and Media class, as well as social work students who can complete practicum and observation hours at TCA.
The connection extends into athletics as well. VWU sports teams regularly visit TCA during lunchtime as part of a “sidekick” program, where student-athletes from teams like tennis and lacrosse volunteer their time to play, mentor, and build relationships with younger students.
Dr. Scott said TCA is looking forward to continuing partnering in the future. The Robert Nusbaum Center will collaborate with TCA again in the fall, where TCA students will lead a deliberate dialogue for VWU students and community members.
Learn more about the Robert Nusbaum Center at VWU.
Learn more about Tidewater Collegiate Academy on the VWU campus.