Projects / Clark University,
Encouraging Discourse Across Differences
PIs: Sarah Buie, Director, Higgins School of Humanities and Professor, Visual and Performing Arts; William F. Fisher, Professor and Director, IDCE, Department of International Development, Community, and Social Change.
Clark University will institute an interdisciplinary initiative that engages all facets of its community in an effort to create a culture of dialogue on campus. This will be achieved through faculty development; expansion of the curriculum via first-year seminars, new courses and revisions to existing courses in order to engender dialogue; and a pilot year-long Difficult Dialogues Symposium, including public conversations and faculty-student workshops on such topics as terrorism and civil liberties, the relationship between fundamentalism and secularism, diversity and money, religion and government, dialogue itself, etc. The emphasis in these symposia will be to encourage intellectual engagement and open discussion; to develop skills and awareness of genuine dialogue and discourse, including modeling engaged listening and discussion; to develop skills in mediation; and to remove the pressure of conventional classroom performance norms so that students can participate honestly and without fear of being graded.
See the project's site here.