The dialogic workshop: Using dialogic approaches in teaching and learning

Group Submission Type: Workshop

Description of Session

Students and teachers face unprecedented division, conflict, and polarization in the classroom and across school communities. More than ever, we need educational spaces that can empower educators to leverage compassion and curiosity, build authentic relationships, and resist polarization.

The goal of this workshop is to help participants develop the skills and confidence they need to engage differences in ways that create authentic connections, rich mutual understanding, and resilience to political polarization. This highly interactive workshop will anchor participants in the theory of communication across differences and provide a new framework to foster more constructive conversations. Participants will learn and practice tools that strengthen the skills of dialogic listening, inquiry, reflection, and speaking in order to promote healthier dynamics, encourage meaningful interpersonal connections, and mitigate polarization in their classroom or school. These interventions are adaptable for classroom learning, extracurricular activities, and the school culture at large.

We aim for this workshop to address the following objectives:
Introduce participants to the concept of dialogue (particularly the Reflective Structured Dialogue approach) for use in classroom, organizational, and personal contexts;
Become familiar with a framework that supports more constructive conversations
Enable participants to experience reflection, listening, and speaking techniques that support constructive conversations and can be adapted for use in classroom and other educational environments
Create space for sharing ideas

In order to meet these objectives, the workshop will utilize active learning and reflective techniques to help participants consider what a dialogic approach can look like in their professional environments. We will provide an introduction to Essential Partners’ work and to Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD), as well as drawing from existing empirical work to illustrate how the use of RSD can help foster more peaceful and grounded educational spaces in our divided world. The workshop will then engage participants in a series of exercises that will allow participants to imagine how this approach might look in their own contexts. These will include:
An exercise inviting participants to explore the question, “How can we train our ear to listen to all of what is being said, and also to what is being left unsaid”;
An activity that allows participants to experience how the kinds of questions we ask impact and can shift a conversation;
An exercise that has participants reflect on the significance of what they say in terms of how it can shift a conversation from a complaint, or an opinion, towards acknowledging the hopes and values beneath the complaint or perspective shared;
Providing participants with techniques for engaging in reflection in advance of a conversation, around a conversation that you aren’t sure you want to have, or after a conversation in a way that can shift the existing conversational dynamic;
Reflection on the possibilities and challenges of using dialogic approaches in the classroom and other educational environments.

Sub Unit

• Book Launches and Workshops / Workshop

Chair

• Karen Ross, UMASS Boston

Workshop Organizers

• Karen Ross, UMASS Boston

• Allyson Bachta, U Mass Boston

Presenter

• Allyson Bachta, U Mass Boston