Middle Eastern student dialogue: What I’ve learned as a deep conflict expert about enabling conversation

On a dreary winter evening within the basement of a university constructing in March 2015, I stood before about 100 students to interact in a dialogue about the conflict within the Middle East. University of British Columbia (UBC) students participated within the vote. referendum to make your mind up whether their student union should boycott products and divest from corporations that support the Israeli occupation of Palestine – a part of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Many of the scholars present were clearly Muslim, Jewish, or had ties to the region.

I believed about this recently when a group of outstanding Canadians released a statement open letter calling on politicians to handle the rise of incivility and aggression in public discourse.

The letter rightly singles out post-secondary campuses as places to speak about difficult and divisive issues, such as the Hamas-Israel war. But those of us who work on campuses also know that heated conversations can get much more heated when youthful confidence meets academic freedom.

In the United States, there was a recent wave of intensification of civic education at universities and colleges, often under the auspices of bridging differences. But Canada also has a long tradition of providing this manner of education.

Forms of “dialogic education” – during which each students and teachers actively contribute ideas – hold promise, especially when their ideas are energetic possibilities and limitations are properly understood. These forms include campus interviews just like the one I had and a formal training program “Semester in dialogue” in my current institutional home at Simon Fraser University (SFU).

BDS dialogue

At the time of the BDS referendum at UBC, I used to be one in every of the few professors working on conflict resolution (within the School of Community and Regional Planning). So I agreed to convene not a panel, but a real dialogue during which student activists would attempt to talk and hearken to one another.

On the evening of the meeting, tensions were high on campus and palpable within the room as students gathered.

My heart was pounding and a a part of me wondered if saying yes to hosting the event had been a mistake. Still, I knew that given my field of research and teaching, there was clearly no higher candidate. In any case, it was too late to flee.

Experiential learning in dialogue

Since then, I even have turn into acquainted with the 20-plus-year-old experiment known as the Semester of Dialogue organized by my colleagues at SFU. From 2002 to 2023, this program enabled over 1,000 undergraduate students to practice dialogue on difficult, current, local and global issues. Through my previous teaching and experiences, and thru this work, I even have seen firsthand how young people turn into proficient at acquiring civic conversation skills.

IN 2018 study of Semester in Dialogue graduates, 95 percent said they were in a position to reserve judgment, engage in deep listening, and keep an open mind in conversations.

And what students learn at university they take care of all areas of life. In a survey of graduates, 93 percent said they were using the dialogue skills they acquired in the remaining of their education, work, community and private life.

Learning dialogue skills is less about developing awareness and more about constructing muscle. We cannot teach students civility by making them read texts, hearken to lectures, and take exams. We need experiential education.

In experiential education, instructors act less as omniscient experts and more as facilitators, while campuses leverage their power to place-based education where what is occurring locally becomes learning material in real time.

Secret Ingredient: “Containers”

The secret ingredient to successfully working with groups coping with controversial topics is creating physical and psychological conditions that facilitate speaking and listening for understanding. These are the so-called dialogue containers. Facilitators and participants deliberately create them and should include elements such as: how the room is ready up; the extent of hospitality within the space; explicit agreements that group participants agree on about the best way to be together.

On the night of the BDS dialogue, I believed a lot about the container, including: I’m preparing myself intellectually and emotionally to facilitate. But as a group, we also spent almost an hour constructing the container while negotiating group contracts.

Negotiating group contracts

There are many examples of normal group contracts, but I advocate creating them from scratch every time, for every unique situation and group. Often, groups enter into agreements regarding confidentiality and avoidance of private attacks.

On the night of the 2015 BDS referendum, students negotiated several unique agreements, including:

• That we recognize the best to exist of each the Palestinian and Israeli peoples and the best to exist of the states of Palestine and Israel, in accordance with Borders from 1967. (Negotiations on this point, essentially the most contentious issue within the region, took many of the hour. It wasn’t that everybody – or anyone – within the room was blissful with it – nevertheless it was enough of an acknowledgment, enough of a bridge, to make the conversation possible.)

• That if the conversation prolonged beyond 8 p.m., we might order a pizza, and the alternative have to be vegetarian, gluten-free, vegan, halal and kosher. (I all the time thought the pizza deal was groundbreaking because until the time you are talking about sharing fooda lot of humanization happened.)

“Flagging” in real time

IN other spacesmy students negotiated:

• the intention to avoid using overloaded labels circulating on the Internet (words such as “race bait”, “snowflake” or “fascist”);
• replacing the scream reflex with the statement: “I don’t feel heard”;
• to have a bystander raise a literal flag when a person was borderline stereotypical.

Not all situations are suitable for dialogue. Expensive civil conversations on a college campus don’t solve the good conflicts of our time, and neither does a complete semester of dialogue.

Some critics even say that these initiatives are a distraction and a drain on the pursuit of justice, or that they’re “normalize” oppressive systems sweetening them in dialogue.

The ability to be together

However, these initiatives give students who’ve never spoken to one another a space to speak, ask questions they can not ask anywhere else, and gain a more diverse perspective.

The ability to be together is significant and ought to be developed during our student days, in order that we do not think that our only options are screaming on the Internet, acts of despair and complete withdrawal.

While it’s difficult to proceed the conversation about something as divisive as the Hamas-Israel war, as an educator I hope that we are going to proceed to search for the best moment to return to conversations about this topic on our college campuses.