Dialogue Education at American University

by Michael Gibbons and Maria Jessop
Leadership <> Learning
American University, Washington, D.C.

Where did the seeds of Dialogue and ‘Dialogue Education’ originate at AU? Two wellsprings seem clear at this point (there may be others but we are still discovering them). One is the International Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR) program in the School for International Service (SIS), the largest school of international relations in the nation. Building from individual courses in the 1980s and 90s, the IPCR program was formally constituted in 1995 under the leadership of Professor Abdul Aziz Said. The second source is the International Training and Education Master’s Degree Program (ITEP) within the School of Education, Teaching and Health, founded in 1982.

Dialogue in SIS-IPCR
IPCR is an interdisciplinary and applied field concerned with understanding the causes of war and organized violence, developing strategies for resolving conflict, and constructing conditions for peace.  Peace, in this context, encompasses social justice and human rights, political pluralism, cultural diversity, ecological balance, and nonviolent conflict resolution and transformation.

The approach is process-driven rather than content-driven, with insights and knowledge emanating from the personal experiences of the participants, and collective understanding and action springing from participant interaction over time.  Dialogue in IPCR at AU, as it is being taught and practiced within the evolving dialogue program, is primarily understood as a conflict prevention and resolution tool and as an essential skill for practitioners.  Dialogue in IPCR is usually a sustained and facilitated process where participants engage on issues related to social identities, differences, and inequalities with the goal of raising awareness, motivating action for social justice, creating new knowledge, and developing shared understanding.  The approach is process-driven rather than content-driven, with insights and knowledge emanating from the personal experiences of the participants, and collective understanding and action springing from participant interaction over time. 

The dialogue process unfolds in certain recognizable stages, though these stages are fluid and manifest differently depending on the group.  The first can be characterized as a relationship-building stage where participants learn about each other and develop trust.  The second stage generally involves managing tension as differences in viewpoints and experiences are explored.  In the third stage, participants move toward finding ways of coming together and/or living with ambiguity.  This stage can, but does not always, lead to a fourth stage of taking collective action. 

Some key principles of intergroup and sustained dialogue as set forth by such theorists as David Bohm and David Isaacs include: listening to understand, respecting, suspending, and voicing.

Listening to understand or listening together means actively trying to put oneself in the other’s shoes while keeping in mind one’s own perceptions.  The experience, in its highest form, is one of communion, of deep empathic listening in which we let go of resistance to different views, expand our sense of identity so that we can become an “advocate for the whole” rather than just an advocate of our individual perceptions and world view Respecting in dialogue means treating others in the group as your teachers – what is it they know that you do not know?  It does not mean being blind to what they do not know, but means acknowledging them as a legitimate part of the whole and therefore, in a very real sense, a part of us.  Questioning in dialogue is used with the intention of uncovering new knowledge and understanding.  Crafting the right questions – questions that open new space rather than seek to confirm old knowledge – creates a climate of discovery.   Questions are also used to examine assumptions underlying our positions -- holding our “certainties” up to the light -- What makes you so sure?  What led you to believe what you are saying?   Suspending is perhaps the most challenging principle to uphold in dialogue.  It requires us to step back from our own, sometimes deeply held convictions and ingrained positions, and to see things with new eyes.   It requires letting go of certainty and embracing the things we do not already know.  Suspending can make us fearful in that it involves pulling up the anchor of our deeply held beliefs and assumptions, but it is also exhilarating as we navigate unchartered waters, exposing ourselves to new vistas. Voicing or speaking your voice in dialogue means having the courage to reveal what is true for you regardless of outside influences.  It means embracing silence in order to then speak from our innermost authentic selves.  Voicing is a creative act in that it has the potential to transform ourselves and others in the group.  It is also one of the most challenging aspects of dialogue in that it requires self-trust, connection to the inner flow of the group, and the ability to act on our intuition of what needs to be said now, in this moment.

History and Evolution of Dialogue in IPCR
In 2004, IPCR faculty member Mohammed Abu-Nimer developed and began teaching an IPCR elective course called “Dialogue: Approaches and Applications”, the first full-fledged course on dialogue at AU.  The course focuses on theoretical models of dialogue in interethnic, inter-religious, intercultural, inter-organizational, and other forms of identity-based conflicts.  It explores the necessary skills to conduct dialogue in conflict settings, such as basic conflict assessment, communication skills, designs, and evaluation of dialogue processes.  It also examines conditions and criteria for effective dialogue frameworks based on examination of various case studies of interethnic and interfaith dialogue.  The course adopts an interactive and experiential format with students participating in sustained dialogue in and outside the classroom.

A group of SIS graduate students in the spring 2006 “Dialogue: Approaches and Applications” course were motivated by their class experience to find ways to engage the wider university community on the issues of race, privilege and other sources of division and alienation through meaningful dialogue. They established The Dialogue Development Group (DDG), with the following goals:

Identify and surface issues that matter to and/or divide the AU community which dialogue could impact positively. Create a culture of dialogue on campus through the development and institutionalization of both curricular and extra-curricular dialogue programs. Provide education, training and practical experience in dialogue facilitation to graduate students. Develop new approaches and applications for dialogue. Provide research opportunities on dialogue. Be a model, bridge, resource and support to AU and the wider community on how to overcome alienation, fragmentation, polarization, division and civic disengagement.

In Fall of 2006, with the support of the IPCR faculty, DDG launched a pilot program to engage AU students in sustained dialogue on social identities, differences, inequalities and social change in both local and international contexts.  A dialogue component was introduced into five IPCR courses and one General Education course.  Students enrolled in these courses were given the option of fulfilling part of their course requirements through participation in a sustained dialogue (six 2-hour weekly sessions) on a topic related to social identity.  The dialogues also drew participants from other academic programs and schools at AU who participated without receiving academic credit.  41 students in all participated in four dialogue groups facilitated by trained graduate students under the supervision of IPCR professors Ron Fisher and Mohammed Abu-Nimer. 

Students’ reported outcomes included heightened awareness of their own and others’ prejudices and biases, increased ability to communicate about sensitive or difficult topics, and a heightened interest in practicing dialogue in both their professional and personal lives. The pilot program proved highly successful with 100% of evaluation questionnaire respondents reporting they would recommend the program to others.  Students’ reported outcomes included heightened awareness of their own and others’ prejudices and biases, increased ability to communicate about sensitive or difficult topics, and a heightened interest in practicing dialogue in both their professional and personal lives.  The program continued into the spring of 2007 with another four successful dialogue groups supervised by IPCR professor Christos Kyrou.

DDG has been experimenting with a number of dialogue topics.  The topics of the dialogues over the 2006-07 academic year were:  Experiences with Race and Ethnic Relations; Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality; U.S. – Middle East and Islamic Relations; Our Relationship with Our own and Other Faiths; and North-South Relations in a Globalized World.  The U.S.-Middle East dialogues drew the largest number of participants.

DDG also held a number of one session “community dialogues” on The War in Lebanon; Living in a Post-9/11 World; and The Immigration Debate:  What’s On Your Mind?  These two-hour sessions were open to the entire AU community and were designed to provide a safe outlet on subjects of concern and/or interest to students as well as provide broad exposure to the principles of dialogue.

DDG is currently planning for Fall 2007 and is reaching out to other departments at AU, including ITEP, in an effort to increase participation and diversity in its dialogues.
 
DDG is currently grappling with the challenge of institutionalization.   While DDG’s status as a student group with faculty involvement has allowed it to catalyze great interest in the dialogues, the growth and sustainability of its dialogue programs will depend on securing  institutional support from AU and outside funding.  A paid staff position to manage and grow the dialogue program is seen as a key step toward institutionalization.  Another way DDG is seeking to institutionalize dialogue is through the development of more dialogue courses, such as an undergraduate course on intergroup dialogue and a graduate seminar in dialogue facilitation.   

Dialogue Learning in ITEP
The ITEP Education program was founded by a graduate of the Center for International Education (CIE) at the The Training Program Design course exemplifies the ITEP course approach to balancing learner, teacher and institutional interests; expanding accountability to include mutual accountability of learners with faculty; and managing the contradiction of power-sharing within the university-instructor-student situation. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, an early proponent of popular and nonformal education and home of Jane Vella’s doctoral studies (GLP founder). Flavia Ramos, the most recent ITEP program, is also a graduate of CIE at U Mass. Within ITEP, two core and one elective course actually demonstrate “Dialogue Education” as the course teaching/learning method and also cover theory/ practice of dialogue education as course content. These courses are “Training Program Design” (otherwise known as ‘Adult Learning in Action’), “Nonformal Education and Development”, and “Advanced Training Program Design”. Michael Gibbons (who worked with Jane Vella at Save the Children) and Don Graybill (another graduate of the U Mass CIE program) developed the current basic design of these courses and taught them together from 1999 until 2006. Michael, Flavia Ramos, Lynn Cohen and Anne Marie Kupferer have been sharing the teaching and refinement of these courses recently.

The Training Program Design course exemplifies the ITEP course approach to balancing learner, teacher and institutional interests; expanding accountability to include mutual accountability of learners with faculty; and managing the contradiction of power-sharing within the university-instructor-student situation. The course uses Jane Vella’s books as the core texts, building on her principles of Dialogue Education as the conceptual framework of the course. These easily accessible texts that illustrate Vella’s Dialogue Education principles with field-reality story-telling are a favorite with grad students and read like ‘chats (or dialogues) with Jane’.

The Principles of Dialogue Education are familiar to many GLP colleagues. To highlight a few:

Listening - “Learning to listen, learning to teach” is the name of Vella’s book on Dialogue Education. Vella believes that teaching begins with and is centered on listening (as opposed to ‘expert knowing’), much like our IPCR colleagues begin dialogue with ‘listening to understand’ and center dialogue on active listening. Safety, Sound Relationships, Teamwork – creating a safe space for learning is a hallmark of dialogue learning, where learners interests, needs and personal preferences define sound relationships based on mutual respect. Teamwork asserts the collaborative/shared rather than competitive/individualistic nature of dialogue learning This set of principles mirrors the ‘respecting’ principle that animates IPCR dialogue practice. Praxis – For Vella, the best learning is active, engaged and involves practice. This allows the learner to complete the full series of action-reflection-generalization-application steps of “experiential learning” as described by Dewey, Kolb and others. The centrality of practice (doing), as opposed to just reading and talking, is a hallmark of both ITEP and IPCR approaches to graduate learning, and is the core premise of the Dialogue Development Group. Questioning – Perhaps the core element of facilitation of adult learning for Vella is the framing of probing questions that trigger successive layers of dialogue among learners. This is wholly consistent with the ‘questioning’ principle of dialogue developed by our IPCR colleagues

This initial dialogue between instructor and learners sets the tone for listening, cooperative learning and shared decision-making in the course, and provides the instructor an opportunity to identify learner themes/interests around which to tailor each version of the course. These ideas help animate course discussion and illuminate course teaching/learning actions. While the general Training Program Design course approach is prepared beforehand, specific course content and sequence is adjusted to the interests of the students in the class based on personal learning plans and interviews with students. This helps balance learner, teacher and ITEP interests. The course deviates from the traditional 13 weekly 2.5 hour classes format – instead the class meets 8 times for 2.5 hours to explore specific training topics, and meets for two full Saturday sessions which feature practice of (a) training design, (b) facilitation of learning activities, and (c) peer observation/feedback. This allows fulfillment of seat hours requirements while adjusting to the need for extended periods of in-depth practice. The first individual assignment of the course is development of a Personal Learning Plan, and every student meets for one hour with the faculty/facilitator to review the plan (including personal goals, interests, concerns and expectations) in the first few weeks of the course. This initial dialogue between instructor and learners sets the tone for listening, cooperative learning and shared decision-making in the course, and provides the instructor an opportunity to identify learner themes/interests around which to tailor each version of the course.

But when each weekly class begins, the faculty member does not ‘teach’, rather, s/he organizes and facilitates the session as an active, cooperative learning activity about the topic at hand, where learners engage in dialogue stimulated by in-class experiential activities, readings, faculty ideas. During weekly class sessions, the faculty member lays out the general framework of the topic to be addressed, and shares the session plan for the class. But when each weekly class begins, the faculty member does not ‘teach’,- rather, s/he organizes and facilitates the session as an active, cooperative learning activity about the topic at hand, where learners engage in dialogue stimulated by in-class experiential activities, readings, faculty ideas. The ‘findings’ of each class session dialogue and group work are recorded and distributed by students to students as the knowledge base of the course. The weekly session plan developed by the instructor and shared at the beginning of each session shows how each active learning task and class dialogue is designed, and at the end of each session the design is reviewed and critiqued – another layer of ‘training design dialogue’. The other course assignments – interviewing a working trainer, critically reviewing a training manual, designing a training course, and facilitating sessions – are shared among student participants as further cooperative learning generating dialogue. The weekly classes, Saturday practice/feedback sessions and the overall course are designed to be demonstrations of Dialogue Education-in-action. The faculty behavior during the course illustrates the role of facilitator instead of instructor, while retaining the final grading authority based on the assignment and participation outputs of the students.

Conclusion
AU faculty and graduate students interested in further strengthening the role of Dialogue Education are using the Dialogue Development Group mechanism to explore additional ways to help each other promote the approach, principles and values in different courses, programs and the wider AU educational culture. This joint article itself is one means by which some of the similarities and differences between IPCR and ITEP approaches to dialogue and dialogue learning are being explored in the search for common understanding, principles and practices. We recognize that this exploration is a work in progress, as is use of dialogue as a teaching/learning topic and practice in a graduate study academic setting. The authors welcome comments to further their own learning.

For more information about DDG, please visit www.aupeace.org/ddg

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