Dialogue and Higher Education

This week on Words That Matter, we will be featuring content from a recent conference put on by Clark University's Difficult Dialogues initiative in which the Public Conversations Project participated.  The event—Inviting Dialogue: Renewing the Deep Purposes of Higher Education—brought together eighty faculty, administration, and staff from New England colleges and universities and professional dialogue practitioners to discuss the role of dialogue in renewing the deep purposes of higher education, including civic engagement, exchanges across differences, critical thinking and reflection, and creative problem solving.

The conference opened with a community-wide gathering on February 11 where the Public Conversations Project's Dave Joseph and Clark University's Sarah Buie offered opening remarks, and Patricia Romney gave the keynote address on the importance of dialogue in our diverse society.  The following day included nine workshops aimed at building a network of people invested in dialogue on higher education campuses.  Participants discussed their current efforts to build dialogue programs and explore the power of dialogue to challenge assumptions around discourse and power relationships within academia.

In the coming days, we are looking forward to bringing you a series of posts that will share the conference with you through our blog. These posts will include a video of Dave Joseph's address, and reflections from several participants including a Public Conversations Project facilitator, a staff member of Clark University’s Difficult Dialogues program, and a student.

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We begin by presenting some pictures from the event in the slideshow

March 3, 2010