Diana Hess
Diana Hess, Dean of the UW-Madison School of Education from 2016-2024, is a leading expert in civic education, discussion, and the teaching of controversial political, constitutional, and legal issues. She wrote “Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussion,” which won the Exemplary Research Award from the National Council for Social Studies in 2009. Her most recent book, “The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education,” co-authored with Paula McAvoy, won the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award in 2016 and the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 2017. Hess is deeply committed to working with educators to improve the quality of democratic education in higher education and K-12 schools. She is also the principal investigator for The Discussion Project that started at UW–Madison and is now operating on campuses and in secondary school districts across the nation. Previously, in her role as senior vice president of the Spencer Foundation, Hess created the Disciplined Dialogue project. In addition, while serving as the associate director of the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago, Hess was instrumental in creating a nationwide program of “youth summits” that brought together high school students from communities that were very different from one another to talk about political issues.
Lynn Glueck
Lynn Glueck is the program director, curriculum designer, and an instructor for The Discussion Project. Glueck will be the senior leader of the Deliberation Dinners, working collaboratively with Hess to develop and launch the initiative. Glueck has an impressive 25-year career in K-12 education and higher education. Her excellent leadership as the program director of The Discussion Project has demonstrated that she knows what it takes to create programs that are educationally sound, exciting, and superbly executed. Lynn has also served as the professional development coordinator and school improvement administrator for the Madison Metropolitan School District, as well as an instructional coach for high school teachers.
Emma Cabrera
Emma Cabrera is the project manager of the Deliberation Dinners and will work collaboratively with Glueck and Hess to develop the initiative and manage its day-to-day activities. She was a social studies teacher in Chicago Public Schools and the Madison Metropolitan School District. In addition, Cabrera taught English in South Korea and Japan, and was a staffer in the U.S. Senate. Cabrera is an alumna of UW-Madison who earned a BA in political science and philosophy in 2014 and a master’s in 2018 from the highly ranked Department of Curriculum and Instruction. She was a student-athlete, competing on the women’s swimming team, during her undergraduate years.
Kate Ullman
Kate Ullman was the lead curriculum writer for the Deliberation Dinners in 2023-24. A former high school Government, History, International Relations, and Economics teacher, Kate serves as the Director of the Legislative Semester, a high school government and civics curriculum that engages students in a simulation of the legislative process. She also is an instructor at Northland College. Kate holds a BA in International Relations from Stanford University and a MS in Applied Economics from UW-Madison.
David O’Brien
Curriculum Writer and Facilitator for the 2024-25 Deliberation Dinners
David O’Brien received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2019. He then served as an assistant professor at Tulane University and was the director of Tulane’s Center for Ethics and Public Affairs in 2021-2022 and a faculty fellow-in-residence at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University in 2022-23. He specializes in the philosophy of education, with a focus on understanding how the values of liberty, equality, and community bear on educational justice. His other areas of expertise include ethics and political philosophy, with a focus on understanding the moral significance of distributive inequality. O’Brien’s publications have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Moral Philosophy, the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, Theory and Research in Education, and the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
Harry Brighouse
Curriculum Writer and Facilitator for the 2024-25 Deliberation Dinners
Professor Brighouse regularly teaches classes in applied ethics, political philosophy, and ethics; and he teaches a class for the First Year Interest Group program on Children and the Family, every 3 years. His research interests include all those topics, as well as philosophy of education; and he has an abiding interest in education (including higher education) policy and practice. His recent books include (with Helen Ladd, Susanna Loeb, and Adam Swift) Educational Goods: Values and Evidence in Decision-Making (University of Chicago Press 2018) and (with Adam Swift) Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships (Princeton University Press, 2014). He co-edited The Aims of Higher Education: Problems of Morality and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) with Michael McPherson, which won the 2017 Federic W Ness Award for the book contributing to our understanding of liberal education from the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He directs the Center for Ethics and Education, and is a regular contributor to the group blog Crooked Timber. His strangest accomplishment is an uncredited appearance in the Ken Loach movie Bread and Roses.
Mariana Castro
Facilitator Presenter for the 2024-25 Deliberation Dinners
Mariana Castro is a Curriculum Designer & Instructor for the Discussion Project. She serves as Qualitative Research Director for the Multilingual Learning Research Center at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), a center committed to the improvement of educational outcomes for diverse student populations and to foster collaborations across academic disciplines and practitioners. She brings more than 28 years of experience in education as a former science teacher, a language specialist and a bilingual educator. Throughout her career, she has engaged in curriculum and instruction, teacher preparation and professional learning in the areas of science, language development and bilingual education. In her research, Mariana integrates her background as an educator, her passion for working with multilingual children, youth and their teachers, and her commitment for social justice. Over the last 14 years, her work has also involved policy work related to the education of multilingual learners, including the development of language proficiency standards in Spanish and English. Mariana has a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a M.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She currently serves as the PI for research related to language practices of multilingual students, curriculum and instruction in dual language immersion programs, teacher professional learning and family engagement.
Students
Teresa Nelson
Teresa Nelson is a student assistant for the Deliberation Dinners. She helps with administrative tasks and provides feedback on the curriculum from a student perspective. Nelson is an undergraduate at UW-Madison majoring in philosophy and psychology and pursuing a certificate in criminal justice. Outside of school and work, Nelson enjoys creative writing, participating in the PIVOT psychology lab on campus, and meeting new people.
Paige Dessart
Paige Dessart is a student assistant for the Deliberation Dinners. She helps withadministrative tasks and provides feedback on the curriculum from a student perspective. Dessart is an undergraduate at UW-Madison majoring in Education.
Diana Bonilla
Diana Bonilla is a student assistant for the Deliberation Dinners. She helps withadministrative tasks and provides feedback on the curriculum from a student perspective. Bonilla is an undergraduate at UW-Madison majoring in Legal Studies. In her free time, Bonilla loves to make art, read, and go on hikes.
The Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative provides program evaluation research services to the UW-Madison Deliberation Dinners team. We thank them for their work!
The Deliberation Dinners team would like to extend a special thank you to Scott Wildman, Institutional Policy Analyst in the office Data, Academic Planning, & Institutional Research, and Will Lipske, Associate University Registrar for Academic Services, in the Office of the Registrar for their help in student recruitment, data management, and research.