Undergraduate Community Engaged Learning: Cultivating Conversation Across Differences in Oregon’s Willamette Valley

Abstract: Our poster will focus on The Conversation Project at Willamette University, a multi-level, interdisciplinary, community engaged initiative at Willamette University in Salem, OR. Our motto at Willamette University, “Not Unto Ourselves Alone are We Born,” informs our individual and collective identity and our campus has embraced our mission of turning “knowledge into action,” by developing community-engaged learning across the curriculum creating long-term reciprocal relationships with community partners. The Conversation Project at Willamette is based on a sequenced set of courses designed to enhance student capacity to participate and facilitate conversations across differences culminating with embedding students as facilitators in community-based organizations who are themselves engaged in challenging public conversations.

Narrative: The challenges of divisiveness and suspicion that have defined public discourse in the United States the last seven years have, unsurprisingly, affected liberal arts education. Students are increasingly hesitant to take the intellectual and social risks vital to learning. In particular, they are reluctant to ask questions to which they do not already have answers, to sustain curiosity about ideas with which they disagree, and to hold conversations with people who have ideological positions different from their own. In addition, their sense of the failure of political, climate, economic, social/racial systems creates a sense of incredible urgency, leaving them alternating between despair and panic. The incapacity to build bridges across chasms of suspicion is both a symptom and result of the wider existential challenges they face.

At the same time, community-based organizations across the country have responded to the problem of polarization by developing a range of “dialogue across difference” projects, some of them quite successful. Our project began with researching successful community-based efforts at dialogue across differences (e.g., Essential Partners, Millions of Conversations, Narrative 4, Sisters of Salaam/Shalom, Everyday Democracy, Oregon Humanities, Center for Inclusion and Belonging, and the Center for Engaged Compassion). After distilling our observations into an analysis of why successful community based efforts work, we have sought to translate their approaches into curriculum for a liberal arts university with a goal developing pedagogical strategies that empower faculty to create learning environments that support curiosity, compassion, and dialogue across differences. Our research has been supported by grants from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning and the American Immigration Council’s Center for Inclusion and Belonging (CIB). We currently participate in a nation-wide community of practice with fellows from the CIB where we share our research and experience with community engagement.

Based on our research, we designed a sequence of courses that serves as a centerpiece of a broader initiative at Willamette. Utilizing a tiered approach that allows students to develop deeper skills over time, we have been able to prepare students for community engaged learning and meaningful partnerships. In Tier I, Cultivating a Self Ready for Conversation, students develop interpersonal skills including listening, staying grounded, and cultivating curiosity and compassion for self and others; Tier 2, Facilitation Skills, teaches facilitation of conversation of many types and students design and facilitate a conversation with a campus group; and in Tier 3, Embedding in a Community Organization, students are placed in partner organizations to do this work in community settings. Among the community partners with whom our students have worked are The Immigrant Story, Salem Art Association, Youth with Incarcerated Parents Project (YIPP), and the Oregon State Legislature (which is located across the street from campus). Alongside the three-courses, we have also taught faculty and students how to integrate these approaches into the University’s general education program, first year seminar, and student leadership positions.

Our approach is to think intentionally about preparation and process. In other courses in the liberal arts, students learn how to analyze concepts of difference and develop leadership and advocacy skills, but as Beth Berila has said, to really integrate these lessons, “they need to be absorbed into our very selves, not merely learned at the level of the intellect or political consciousness” (Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy 12). We have come to understand that our students – maybe all of us – need what we might term a “pedagogy of interiority” prior to (or at least alongside of) community engagement. One of the primary theoretical foundations of our work is “contact theory,” which articulates how engage in bridge-building across groups keeping principles of equity and inclusion at the center of group design (Cultivating Contact: A Guide to Building Bridges and Meaningful Connections Between Groups: Linda Tropp and Trisha Dehrone). We are mindful of the ways in which “contact theory” can be crudely, even carelessly, reduced to just bringing different groups together with the predictable results that it can make “in-groups” feel better about themselves, “out-groups” feel exhausted and used as a salve to white feelings, leading to little substantive change. Accordingly, we have designed our courses to prepare students to engage in conversations beginning with an honest assessment of their motivations, and the expectations, fears, and hopes they bring to such encounters

Our research uncovered that although there are differences in some details, there are strong shared patterns in community-based approaches to “dialogue across difference.” Many of the efforts have common aims (creating shared understanding, building bridges, or as one put it, creating exchanges designed for learning rather than winning), and similar ways of accomplishing their work: prioritizing a focus on shared humanity; teaching listening and facilitation skills; utilizing ritual elements to positively shape group dynamics; and utilizing storytelling at key points to build trust and community. Most work fell within what we identified as a four step framework to set up the conversation, which includes: 1) Planning, 2) Agreements for Conversation, 3) Meeting Design, and 4) Facilitation.

One element we found to be overlooked or underdeveloped in community-based organizations is the development of interpersonal skills—e.g., how to stay grounded and non-reactive and at the same time hold appropriate boundaries; how to cultivate an inner disposition of genuine curiosity for people and positions different from our own; how to understand the role of empathy in conversations across difference? Empathy can eclipse difference even as it appears to celebrate it; some theorists argue that instead of “imagining yourself in the other’s shoes,” we ought to bring our fundamental differences to the table. Is the idea of beginning with, or having as a goal “understanding things from another’s perspective” helpful, or problematic, and if so in what ways?

Our poster will represent our research findings from the past three years of grant-supported research, including tools for assessment of student learning we have developed, testimony from students, and strategies for adopting practices as a vital part of a liberal arts education.