Think about all the topics your elders may have advised you not to touch at a family dinner—or all of the topics that you may have observed your elders discussing at the dinner table, with variable levels of skill and agitation: Politics. Religion. Race. Money. Class.
While being asked to jump into a conversation like this might make you feel vulnerable or even scared, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg’s research shows that, in the right setting and with some skill-building, talking about these topics can help us understand each other and the world with more nuance and precision.
“My courses are crucibles,” says Scharbach Wollenberg, associate professor of Judaic studies. “We engage sensitive social issues from the gender spectrum and racism, to abortion and even genocide, using the lens of the Bible, religion, and the historical reception of scriptural motifs among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. This heady mix of religion and controversial social issues typically draws a diverse crowd,” she says, including students from many different cultural, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and who hold a range of political ideologies.
The majority of her students, she says, arrive in class without any training on “how to have conversations about challenging topics across stark demographic and ideological differences.
“They need practical tools to overcome the intense (often physical) social anxiety that surrounds these sorts of discussions for young adults who came of age amidst the nearly simultaneous appearance of the Black Lives Matter protests, COVID shutdowns, and the rise of MAGA,” she says. “Second, students need to be taught the many small social skills that go into having these conversations.”
Scharbach Wollenberg created a series of writing exercises to help her students work through difficult questions. Her students reported that they found the process of doing the exercises grounding from a sensory perspective—slowing their thoughts, reorienting them through their senses to the present moment, and allowing them to disconnect from their devices.
And she noticed that having students write out an exercise before discussing a tense topic “palpably changes the energy in the room—whatever exercise they do that day.”
Those classroom writing exercises grew into The Pluralism Workbook, a book that breaks the “communication process down into tiny, manageable mini-steps.”
Scharbach Wollenberg says her students’ response to the workbooks validated her efforts: “It was like the homework assignment they’d been waiting for all their life.”
After engaging in a dialogue session using the workbook prompts, one student said that they learned “how important it is to slow down and ask where people are coming from instead of guessing … and it left me thinking about how I could bring that same kind of curious, open-ended questioning into class discussions and group projects.”
Scharbach Wollenberg wanted to offer students even more opportunities in real-time conversations to practice the skills they were building with The Pluralism Workbook.
With the support of a 2025 grant from the U-M Humanities Collaboratory, she joined forces with Sangseraima Ujeed, assistant professor of Tibetan Buddhism in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, to create the Pluralism Playdeck: Beta Edition, a conversation game designed to give people the opportunity to practice those skills.
Ujeed researches how the structure of games helps people learn. “Time and again, I found that structured conversation prompts were invaluable in helping students develop meaningful connections with one another,” Ujeed says. The Pluralism Playdeck is “specifically designed around the issues, experiences, and conversations most relevant to campus life today.”
The card game is organized into a range of categories, including ethnicity, politics, identity, culture, and others. Within each category are three levels of questions—Deep, Deeper, and Deepest—that guide players through increasingly reflective conversations.
The Playdeck also includes a set of Process Cards designed to help participants navigate difficult situations if they arise. These cards provide players with options such as, “I’d prefer to pass on this question” or “Could you rephrase that in a different way?”
Scharbach Wollenberg and Ujeed report that when tense moments have arisen during the Pluralism Playdeck games, those moments have resolved with skill and humor.
Recently, Scharbach Wollenberg engaged her faculty colleagues in a discussion that might normally be uncomfortable, but with the help of the Playdeck, it illuminated differences in a way that helped the group to better understand where their colleagues were coming from.
“The group chose to discuss socioeconomic class—the most taboo topic in the faculty world. And yet somehow, 15 minutes in, the players were spilling their guts about not only their own finances (which honestly weren’t that exciting because we were all professors) but also their parents’ and grandparents’ situations—how much they’d grown up with, who lost money when, and what sorts of things they fantasized about buying or doing growing up in their neighborhoods and families of origins. I can’t think of a single other context when any of us would have shared that information with each other.”
Scharbach Wollenberg and Ujeed agree that the game’s guardrails tend to keep discussions both forthright and respectful between players.
“Participants often arrive anticipating a serious or even awkward conversation exercise, but many leave surprised by how engaging and fun the experience can be,” Ujeed adds.
Scharbach Wollenberg says that the game and workbook are both premised on a hopeful idea: “the notion that the vast majority of our students from all walks of life are willing and able to do the hard work of learning from each other if we can just teach them the granular communication techniques and the practices of self-reflection and self-regulation that make these conversations possible.”
Both the workbook and the game are bringing people together all over campus. Student organizations use them in programming, faculty and GSIs have used them in their classrooms, dining halls have hosted lunchtime play sessions, and the U-M Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) has featured them in workshops. Incoming students received the workbook at fall 2025 orientation, and the U-M School of Nursing made the workbook part of its curriculum.
LSA student Jenna Rashid played the game in a course taught by Aaron Rock-Singer, who is a research fellow with the Raoul Wallenberg Institute and a lecturer in Judaic and Middle East studies. “Hearing how other people’s traditions and identities shape their values gave me more context for why we might disagree,” Rashid says, “but also where we might overlap.”
“Every time I use the Playdeck,” Ujeed says, “I come away having learned something new.”
The Pluralism Workbook is dedicated to the memory of Samantha Woll (above), an LSA alum who was committed to communicating respectfully across divides. “One of the inspirations for this project,” Scharbach Wollenberg says, “was to see whether it was possible to teach a new generation of LSA students the skills that were so natural to Samantha.” The Raoul Wallenberg Institute Samantha Woll Dialogues were also created to honor her legacy. Learn more about the Samantha Woll Dialogues.
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