Frequently Asked Questions about Dialogue

Community Dialogues is President Holmes-Sullivan’s signature initiative that launched in January 2023. This ongoing program is intended to make healthy, constructive dialogue a part of our identity as an institution, and the foundation of how we relate to each other in community in both informal and formal settings.

When we talk about “A Community Dialogue” we are referring to a particular form of conversation that involves a small circle of people with a trained facilitator reading from a carefully structured script. See more below.

Dialogue in its broadest sense refers to a conversation between two or more people in which they openly exchange ideas or perspectives. We often contrast this with debate, in which the different parties try to persuade the other to change their mind or win an argument.

In Community Dialogues, we use a highly structured form called Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD). This kind of dialogue prioritizes personal reflection and conversational structures such as timed speaking to help people speak to be understood and listen to understand.

This process creates bonds of trust and mutual understanding. It helps people feel truly heard and fosters a deep sense of belonging.

That’s okay! Dialogues invite participants to share reflections on their own lived experiences. You won’t be asked to take a stance or educate others and there is no expectation that you have prior experience with the topic. The questions we ask are designed to be broadly accessible to people with varied backgrounds and experiences. If you’re interested in having an open conversation with others in your community about a topic, sign up for a dialogue!

We offer facilitator training in collaboration with Essential Partners periodically on campus. We’ve hosted three trainings so far, and have one training coming in January 2025 - sign up here! If you have a chance to sign up, don’t wait! Seats are limited.

The EP Facilitator Training is a two-day training that is designed to equip people with the skills to facilitate meaningful dialogue on campus. In the training, you’ll learn about how to recognize negative cycles of communication and polarization, you’ll gain skills in designing and facilitating Reflective Structured Dialogue, and you’ll practice techniques for engaging in conversations across a variety of perspectives.

We’ve all had the experience of being stuck in the same old pattern in a conversation. This happens in individual relationships and in groups. You may have noticed that the same few people always dominate the conversation in meetings or the classroom, you may feel that you self-silence because you’re afraid of being misunderstood. Perhaps current events are causing a fracture in your once-harmonious group, or maybe there’s a topic that you feel is really important to the community but find it really hard to talk with others about. All these patterns are common and normal, but we don’t have to be stuck there.

Dialogue helps people get unstuck. Reflective Structured Dialogue is effective wherever people with different values and identities need to live and work together. It offers people the opportunity to work together to build bridges across their differences and find new ways of interacting that can be constructive and empowering.

If this resonates, let’s talk. Our approach to dialogue is designed for flexibility – we can work with any groups on campus that believe dialogue, reflective exercise, or training would benefit how your group lives & works together, don’t hesitate to reach out.

We think of dialogue as one among many very important tools in the kit needed to build a better world. We believe dialogue is an action in and of itself that can have a transformative impact on you and others, but it also isn’t a replacement for taking other forms of action.

Dialogue is a powerful tool for setting the preconditions for a group to be able to make a large decision or embark on meaningful change together. For example, by engaging in dialogue, we can learn to stay in relationship with others who we may strongly disagree with but who we may need to be able to work with. If you skip dialogue, you may miss the opportunity to really understand “the other side,” and they may miss the chance to really hear where you’re coming from too. In dialogue, a central purpose is mutual understanding – without understanding it’s hard to make meaningful change.

Reflective Structured Dialogue specifically is a research-based framework for systemic change. “RSD equips people to interrupt dysfunctional dynamics and build relationships across differences in order to address challenges where they live, work, worship, and learn” (EP). In this sense, the goal is not just to alleviate immediate challenges, but to develop a greater capacity as a community to navigate differences of values, beliefs, and identities whenever they arise.

Essential Partners is an organization that works to “help people build relationships across differences to address their communities’ most pressing challenges” by “giving people the means to strengthen relationships, deepen belonging, and renew hope in their communities.” Essential Partners works with hundreds of communities across the country and globe. Learn more about their work here.

EP is our partner in the process of bringing dialogue into our community. We use EP’s approach to dialogue in our programs and EP also trains our practitioners and supports us as we explore how dialogue can benefit our Lewis & Clark communities in various ways.

This initiative is based on the goal of making healthy, constructive conversation part of the fabric of who we are as an institution. In addition to training facilitators and hosting dialogues that give community members opportunities to directly experience dialogue, we are working with various people across campus to explore how dialogue might show up in their contexts. Some people adapt elements of our approach to meet their own needs, such as using timed go-arounds in a meeting to make sure everyone on the team is heard, or asking students to reflect on their own before sharing their thoughts in a class discussion.