Facilitation Skills: Dialogue

1 Credit · Level: Undergraduate

Welcome to Facilitation Skills for Dialogue! This is an offering of Georgetown University’s intergroup dialogue program A Different Dialogue, part of the Doyle Engaging Difference Program at the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS). Intergroup dialogue is an approach to education that engages students from two or more social identity groups in facilitated and sustained exchange across cultural and social divides, around a central topic. The educational goals of A Different Dialogue center: raising awareness/consciousness of personal and social identities and of social systems; relationship-building across sociopolitically and historically situated differences and conflict; and ultimately fostering individual and collective capacities to promote social justice. This process asks students to engage in genuine dialogue, which — different from debate, in which participants typically listen to gain advantage — we believe affords opportunities for a deeper understanding of the issues at hand. Over the course of A Different Dialogue sessions, groups engage in four sequenced stages of intergroup dialogue: (1) group beginnings — forming and building relationships; (2) exploring differences and commonalities of experience; (3) exploring and dialoguing about hot topics; and (4) action planning and alliance building. Dialogues are structured, co-facilitated spaces. In this one-credit course, students will gain the tools needed to skillfully and confidently co-facilitate groups of their peers within intergroup dialogues and other small group settings. The course mirrors the structure of dialogues, offering students one credit and meeting for either seven or eight, face-to-face, two-hour sessions. The classes themselves are a mix of seminar-style instruction, in which students would read and discuss texts on critical pedagogy and the practice of thoughtful facilitation, as well as receive a firm grounding in the subject matter of the dialogues (privilege, power, identity, and the various –isms in a social and historical context). By the end of the course, these conversations will be co-facilitated by pairs of the students in order to build their comfort with facilitation and to give their instructors and peers the opportunity to assess them and provide feedback on their technique. Interspersed throughout the sessions will also be practical opportunities for the facilitators to experience dialogic pedagogy and activities that they might employ in their facilitation practice.