Last week we announced our funded webinar series on free speech and inclusion (Google Doc). Everyone is welcome to attend every session, but we have 20 paid spots for people to attend all sessions and produce the related deliverables. The application for these spots is brief and due on 9/20.
Today’s teaching tip is related to this upcoming webinar series. Dr. Mylien Duong is the Senior Director of Research and Innovation for the Constructive Dialogue Institute. She was a recent guest on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast for a conversation about Facilitating Contentious Conversations in Your Classroom (Duong, 2024). Her work in this field is cutting edge and I want to share an abbreviated guide to setting up classroom discussions from her co-authored 2022 piece in Times Higher Education (the whole thing is worth a read, but this section is an abbreviated quotation from the article).
- Invest time to foster a positive climate. Get to know your students as students and as people.
- Establish ground rules, norms or shared agreements for discussions. Whatever you call them, it’s more effective to co-create these norms with your students rather than simply telling students what they are.
- Plan discussions. Meaningful exchanges rarely happen spontaneously. Planning for discussions means two things.
- Think through what role you want to play during the discussion. Is your stance one of intentional neutrality? Will you challenge a student’s point of view if you don’t agree? What if you find the point of view offensive? Will you play devil’s advocate? Under what circumstances, if any, will you as facilitator express your own stance on an issue?
The key takeaway from the work of Dr. Duong is that facilitating this sort of dialogue requires planning. We often see poorly planned classroom discussions in YouTube shorts or things that seem expertly constructed during peer observations. The planning work is lost in these snapshots. It can take up class time, it can be challenging, but in the end building community is worth it for an array of reasons–not least among them is the capacity to have meaningful conversations about difficult issues.
Last thing, just a reminder that this Thursday we are collaborating with Information Security, the Technology and Learning Program, and Student Rights and Responsibilities to offer a workshop on Academic Integrity and AI. It is on Zoom from 9-11am on Thursday and we will record it.
Zach Justus
Director of Faculty Development
Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences
Google Voice/Text: 530-487-4150
All past Tuesday Tips are curated on the FDEV website.
