1. DIALOGUE FOR RECIPROCITY
Diane Maodush-Pitzer
Danielle Lake

2. GETTING STARTED…
1.Please introduce yourself & then answer the following:
2. Why do you value community engaged teaching?
3. What challenges have you faced/do you foresee when students work with community partners?
“Anytime you are going to do community engagement it starts with listening – if we don’t start there, we are in trouble.”

3. OBJECTIVES One Two Three Four
Understand the value and role of dialogue when trying to collaborate with a diverse group of others.
Provide pedagogical tools for fostering dialogic virtues and practices.
Offer in-class engagement activities, assignment ideas, and community-engaged project suggestions designed to help students “work with” community partners.
Apply/revise any one or more recommended practices so its fits your own course needs.
OVERARCHING GOAL: Provide YOU with tools for helping students employ quality dialogic practices / good listening skills for working WITH community partners
OBJECTIVES:
Define dialogue and reciprocity
Provide helpful examples/assignment ideas for encouraging students to employ effective dialogic skills
Ask you consider how you can revise & use one suggested activity from today
Have you share what was valuable and how you might put it to use in your own class
Give you some further resources in case you are interested in learning more about Dialogue for Reciprocity (links, reading suggestions, handout, etc.)

4. Explores underlying causes & assumptions – Frame problem SUSPEND
REFLECTIVE DIALOGUE
Explores underlying causes & assumptions – Frame problem
SUSPEND
“Listen w/o resistance”
CONVERSATION
“to turn together”
DELIBERATION
“to weight out”
GENERATIVE DIALOGUE
New insights, Ingenuity, creativity
DEFEND
“to ward off”
-- Modified from William Isaac’s Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, 1999

5. Dialogue is about LEARNING. Debate is about WINNING.
What is dialogue?
Dialogue is about LEARNING.
Debate is about WINNING.
Assume that others have a piece of the answer
Assume there is one right answer – and you have it
Collaborative
Combative
About finding common ground.
About winning
Listen to understand and find basis for disagreement
Listen to find flaws and make counter-arguments
Inspecting your assumptions.
Defending your assumptions
Discovering new possibilities and opportunities
Seeking an outcome that agrees with your position.

6. RECIPROCITY
Are we talking ‘at’ or ‘with’?

7. TEACHING Democratic Thinking & Action
CO-CREATE RULES
Build, test, and revise ground rules
Participatory Virtues
BUILD COMMUNITY
Foster opportunities for community-building (TRUST)
RE-DISTRIBUTE POWER
Give students more ownership
Employ Experiential learning
Employ experiential learning model

8. Example one: Viewpoint Learning Ground rules
Speak only for yourself, not as a representative of any group
Treat everyone as an equal: leave role, status, and stereotypes at the door
Be open and listen to others even when you disagree
Search for assumptions
Look for common ground
Keep dialogue and decision-making separate
dialogue/

9. PARTICIPATORY VIRTUES
Co-create
practice
Research & Compare
Reflect & Discuss
Revise

10. Experimentalism “Listen fully.”
“Act with courage, while remaining open to others.”
“Respect one another by respecting our differences.”
“Think critically by engaging tension and digging deeper.”

11. Example 2: World café 1. Clarify the Purpose
2. Create a Hospital Space
3. Explore Questions that Matter
4. Encourage Everyone’s Contributions
5. Connect Diverse Perspectives
6. Listen for insights and share discoveries

12. EXAMPLE 4: ENCOURAGE COMMUNITY
Foster Perplexity
Focus on Context
Integrate Narrative
Expand Ethical Framework
Aim for Collaboration & Ingenuity

13. STUDENT OWNERSHIP USE EXPERIENCE: OBSERVE & REFLECT:
Asks students to engage in an experience
OBSERVE & REFLECT:
Requires students to carefully observe and reflect on the experience from multiple perspectives
INTEGRATE & CREATE:
Requires students integrate observations with course content and develop concepts/theories/hypotheses about the issue
EXPERIMENT & REVISE:
Asks students to put their theory/hypothesis to the test and reflect on what they’ve learned by doing so
See examples 5, 6, & 7

14. Acknowledge the views present
begin with values
We cannot engage genuinely in dialogue when we ignore our “lived experiences,” our feelings, our “vulnerability and anger,” and “the body that carries these feelings and experiences” (Freema Elbaz-Luwisch, 2004, p. 9, 13).
Begin with Values
Acknowledge the views present

15. COMMON GROUND??? The area “between”
Can we find common ground with others? Yes
Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy
PRO-LIFE? PRO-CHOICE?
PRO-DIALOGUE
dialogue/4863/audio?embed=1

16. THE ART OF THINKING TOGETHER
Dialogue
Assume integrity
Slow down
Suspend
Listen
Create a space
Befriend polarity
THE ART OF THINKING TOGETHER
William Isaacs, 1999

17. ENCOURAGE A RIGHT TO DISAGREE
“Protecting our right to disagree is one of democracy’s gifts, and converting this inevitable tension into CREATIVE ENERGY is part of democracy’s genius” (9).

18. CREATIVE TENSION Tension = a condition to be relieved Reduce eliminate
Stress
Ill health
Reduce
eliminate
Tension = a productive energy
“Stress of being stretched by alien ideas, values, and experiences” (13).

19. Open listening
RESPECT different perspectives, cultures, and professions,
RESIST privileging one above another,
RECOGNIZE the role of conflict,
INTEGRATE insights from different perspectives into a plausible explanation.

20. PROCESSES, FORMATS, & TOOLS
DELIBERATIVE DESIGN
FACILITATION TOOLS
Town hall meetings,
National Issues forums,
Consensus Conferences,
Planning Cells,
citizen juries,
online dialogues
participatory policy
action research
T-charts,
Decision Matrixes,
Force-field Analyses,
Bridge Building,
Mind Mapping,
Zig-Zag Decision Making
Etc.

21. Example 8 TEAM PERFORMANCE MODEL
Orient across differences
Build Trust and establish community
Clarify goals
Commit to actions
Implement

22. JUDGING DELIBERATION SIX ESSENTIALS
Reasoned opinion expressed
References to external sources articulated
Expressions of disagreement given
Equal levels of participation
Structure and topic cohere
Engagement between participants
Jennifer Stromer-Galley (2007). “Measuring Deliberation’s Content: A Coding Scheme.” Journal of Public Deliberation. 3 (1): 1-12.

23. Discussion audit What ideas were generated? Solutions?
Where was there disagreement?
What was the level of consensus?
How might ideas generated have an impact?
Revised from Brookfield & Preskill (2005)

24. DELIBERATION PROBLEMS BENEFITS Procedural Ethical “Group Think”
“Cascade effects”
Reinforce extremism
Reinforce social bias
Challenge narrow perspectives
Community involvement in community problems
Co-create transformational solutions & innovative policy

25. YOUR TURN
Consider how you might design an activity (or assignment) for one of your own courses that utilizes any of the recommendations given.