With political tensions high and recent changes to the University now felt across campus, classrooms are either actively experiencing more conflict or anticipating increased levels of conflict. When conflict comes up, usually the reaction is to manage or lessen the disruption. But what if we started to view the emergence of conflict in our classrooms as an opportunity for deep and meaningful learning.
The Program on Intergroup Relations (IGR) is a University of Michigan organization that trains faculty, staff and students to embrace and even invite conflict. Conflict is not seen as negative or something to be avoided, but rather seen as an inevitable product of engaged learning environments. This view of conflict is rooted in dialogic pedagogy, which promotes dialogue as a means of collaboratively constructing knowledge. Intergroup dialogue practices ask students to learn through dialogue and provide training in how dialogue differs from more prevalent forms of communication happening in classrooms, such as debate or discussion.
The learning environments that are created when dialogic pedagogy guides the learning are ones where power hierarchies are actively balanced, the learner's lived experience is valued equally with the instructor’s expertise, and the co-constructed learning experience is as integral to the course as the content.
For dialogic learning environments to succeed, learners must actively engage with conflict. In liberal arts courses, teachers focus on developing critical thinking skills, problem solving skills and other transferable skills such as collaboration and communication skills. In order to learn these skills, students will need to confront problems, question assumptions, and engage with opposing viewpoints. In short, they will need to engage with conflict. The transferrable skills essential to a liberal arts education cannot be taught through direct instruction alone; they emerge through authentic learning experiences where conflict naturally arises.
To successfully create a learning space where students are willing to engage with conflict, practitioners of intergroup dialogue spend significant time building trust among learners. Learners spend time getting to know one another as individuals. Activities range from learners taking attendance, identifying each person by name, which encourages everyone to invest in learning about one another, to sharing a 5 minute poem that expresses their identity. Like all learning, these activities are scaffolded over a length of time so that learners build trust and comfort with one another before they are invited to share more personal information.
In the same way that learners build trust with each other over time, they also start building their capacity to engage in conflict. From the very beginning, participants are encouraged to start leaning into conflict. This could be done by simply asking learners on the first day of class to pair up with someone who has a different experience than themselves vs. asking learners to find a partner who has something in common with them. Instructors who are versed in this approach to learning are very comfortable in eliciting differing points of view. The aim is to surface all perspectives and engage with them to build understanding.
The care spent on creating a community of learners that trusts one another to engage in conflict enables truly transformational learning to take place. Learning that can only happen in community with others. One of the requirements of all of the faculty and staff programs led by IGR is that participants commit to in person meetings. The act of coming together in person and engaging not only with words but with whole bodies, where physical cues are part of what students are taught to respond to and interrogate is something that cannot be outsourced to any other modality. Our in person classrooms have the potential to offer students a truly engaged learning experience where human expertise and the communal act of learning are leveraged to construct knowledge.
For instructors interested in learning how to facilitate dialogic practices in their own classrooms, there is a new programmatic offering, Dialogic Facilitation Training, as part of IGR’s Community of Scholars, designed for faculty and staff that is currently accepting applicants until Monday, February 23rd. Other opportunities to receive training in dialogic pedagogy is the Intro to Dialogic Pedagogy and Practice seminar offered in the fall. This program is designed for faculty and staff to gain experience with intergroup dialogue and dialogic pedagogy and become practitioners in their own contexts. For student training, IGR offers a variety of credit-bearing courses for students, an academic minor in intergroups relations education, and co-curricular opportunities through their CommonGround program.
If you would like to learn more about opportunities provided by IGR, you can visit their website.
References/Additional Resources:
Intergroup Relations Intro to Dialogic Pedagogy and Practice
LSA Equitable Teaching, Applying Dialogic Techniques
