{"id":72569,"date":"2024-04-22T11:26:38","date_gmt":"2024-04-22T15:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=72569"},"modified":"2024-04-23T00:48:46","modified_gmt":"2024-04-23T04:48:46","slug":"middle-east-student-dialogue-as-an-expert-in-deep-conflict-what-ive-learned-about-making-conversation-possible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/middle-east-student-dialogue-as-an-expert-in-deep-conflict-what-ive-learned-about-making-conversation-possible\/","title":{"rendered":"Middle East student dialogue: As an expert in deep conflict, what I\u2019ve learned about making conversation possible"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

On a dreary winter evening in a university building basement in March 2015, I stood before some 100 students for a dialogue on the conflict in the Middle East. University of British Columbia (UBC) undergraduates were voting in\u00a0a referendum<\/a>\u00a0to decide whether their student union should boycott products and divest from companies that support Israel\u2019s occupation of Palestine \u2014 part of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Many students present were visibly Muslim or Jewish, or had ties to the region.<\/p>\n

I thought of this recently as a group of prominent Canadians issued an\u00a0open letter<\/a>\u00a0calling for politicians to address the rise of incivility and aggression in public discourse.<\/p>\n

The letter rightly identifies post-secondary campuses as spaces for holding conversations on difficult and divisive issues like the Hamas-Israel war. But those of us working on campuses also know heated conversations can be extra heated where youthful certainty meets academic freedom.<\/p>\n

In the United States, there has been a recent wave of universities and colleges stepping up civic education, often under the auspices of\u00a0bridging differences<\/a>. But Canada is also home to long-standing traditions of delivering this form of education.<\/p>\n

Forms of \u201cdialogic education\u201d \u2014 where both students and teachers actively contribute ideas \u2014 are promising, especially when their\u00a0possibilities and limitations<\/a>\u00a0are properly understood. These forms include campus conversations like the one I facilitated, and a\u00a0formal training program, the \u201cSemester in Dialogue\u201d<\/a>\u00a0at my current institutional home at Simon Fraser University (SFU).<\/p>\n

BDS dialogue<\/strong><\/h4>\n

At the time of the BDS referendum at UBC, I was one of the only faculty members teaching in the area of conflict resolution (at the School of Community and Regional Planning). So I agreed to convene, not a panel, but an actual dialogue in which student activists would attempt to speak and listen to each other.<\/p>\n

The night of the meeting, tensions were high on campus and palpable in the room as students gathered.<\/p>\n

My heart pounded and some part of me questioned whether it was a mistake to have said yes to facilitating the event. Still, I knew given my area of research and teaching, there wasn\u2019t an obvious better candidate. And at any rate, it was too late to run.<\/p>\n

Experiential learning in dialogue<\/strong><\/h4>\n

I\u2019ve since become familiar with the 20+ year experiment known as the Semester in Dialogue organized by my colleagues at SFU. Between 2002 and 2023, this program immersed over 1,000 undergraduate students in the practice of dialogue on difficult, topical, local and global issues. Through my earlier teaching and experiences and this work, I\u2019ve seen first-hand how young people capably pick up skills for civic conversations.<\/p>\n

In a\u00a02018 survey<\/a>\u00a0of Semester in Dialogue alumni, 95 per cent reported they could suspend judgement, engage in deep listening and remain open minded in conversations.<\/p>\n

And what students learn at university\u00a0they take into all areas of life<\/a>. In the alumni survey, 93 per cent reported they used dialogue skills they acquired in the rest of their education, work, community and personal life.<\/p>\n

Learning skills to dialogue is less like developing awareness and more like building a muscle. We cannot teach civility to students by having them read texts or listen to lectures and pass a test. We need experiential education.<\/p>\n

In experiential education, instructors act less as all knowing experts, and more as facilitators, while campuses lean into their strength for\u00a0place-based education<\/a>\u00a0where what is happening in community becomes the learning material in real time.<\/p>\n

Secret ingredient: \u2018Containers\u2019<\/strong><\/h4>\n

One secret ingredient to successfully working with groups concerned with contentious topics is creating physical and psychological conditions that make it easier to speak and listen with the goal of understanding. These are known as\u00a0dialogic containers<\/a>. Facilitators and participants intentionally build these, and they can include things like: how the room is set up; the level of hospitality in the space; explicit agreements participants in the group assent to about how to be together.<\/p>\n

On the night of the BDS dialogue, I thought a lot about the container, including\u00a0preparing myself<\/a>\u00a0intellectually and emotionally to facilitate. But in the group, we also spent nearly an hour building the container through negotiating group agreements.<\/p>\n

Negotiating group agreements<\/strong><\/h4>\n

There are many examples of standard group agreements, but I believe in making them from scratch every time, for each unique situation and group. Often groups make agreements about confidentiality and avoiding personal attacks.<\/p>\n

The night of the 2015 BDS referendum, students negotiated some unique agreements, including:<\/p>\n