Instructors often describe feeling compelled to turn to dialogue as a tool in moments of crisis. At these times, instructors should make clear-eyed assessments of their purposes and capacities before going into the classroom—including whether they have a sufficient understanding of complex and evolving subjects to be good facilitators. Other strategies of acknowledging crises exist for those who are not ready to host a dialogue. Trauma-Informed Pedagogy outlines how instructors can acknowledge the impact of world events on students and colleagues. From a different angle, Election and Post-Election Conversations in the Classroom has sections on self-reflection and first steps that can guide instructors through the process of assessing their purposes.

Let the overall objectives that you’ve set for the class guide the type of discussion formats that you might use. For example, debates might feature in classes that emphasize public speaking, but deliberations and dialogues might appear in those that focus on collaborative research or problem solving.

Exercises that guide students through the process of discussing how they want to relate during a specific course can also be used to facilitate a discussion on what it looks like to share responsibility for learning without imposing uniformity. See the CEP’s guide on Crafting Community Agreements for more guidance on how to achieve this.

Opportunities offered early in the semester for students to develop skills, including but not limited to active and empathic listening and representing their views without monopolizing conversation, allow students to experience essential dialogue practices outside of a heated context and without worrying about assessments or grades.

Different class formats and topics of discussion will demand different facilitation styles—such as neutral, multipartial, advocacy, or others. Consult with the CEP if you’d like to talk through any questions as you determine an approach to facilitation that works for your objectives, teaching philosophy, and students.

When discussions become heated, it will often be necessary to debrief what transpired after everyone has had time to process—to give people a chance to follow up or clarify points or to talk about what did and didn’t work well from the instructor’s perspective on the course’s goals.

Eva Boodman defines critique fatigue as “the discouragement, demoralization, and disempowerment that groups of students may collectively experience when there is too much ‘critical’ content (content aiming to reveal and explain the patterns and mechanisms of oppression)” and a dearth of structured skill-building in one’s course that would allow for creative and practical responses to the material they are being asked to engage with, especially when it may relate to their own experience (Boodman, 28). This type of fatigue may compound and/or be interconnected with the high levels of chronic stress, depression, disconnectedness, and anxiety that college students are already experiencing, as detailed in this recent article, “Stress is Hurting College Students'' and in a recent study showing that these issues of emotional wellbeing take an unequal toll on students of color.

In a context in which many students report that they are already experiencing high levels of anxiety and depression, a course centered primarily around, for example, repeatedly discussing patterns of oppression but not allowing for or encouraging creative, affective, or activist expression about the material may produce critique fatigue. Manifestations of this fatigue might emerge in students disengaging from class discussions entirely or expressing that they know the violence of these histories, but don’t see what—if anything—can be done about them. Intentionality in syllabus design is an important first step to considering how the pacing of your course, the nature of your assignments, and the degree of agency that your course offers students. What Boodman calls radical scaffolding, a type of course design that emphasizes students’ agency, can be helpful as one way to decrease alienation and apathy (Boodman, 2019).

Roger Fisher and Taryn Petryk, two researchers who use intergroup dialogue—a discussion format that facilitates peer learning between groups with different social identities—describe their work as the practice of affirmative inquiry (Fisher and Petryk, 2017). Affirmative inquiry is the name these authors give to a set of values that guide facilitators as they aim to foster mutual risk-taking in conversation and shared responsibility and benefit in learning. But before the complexity and mutuality of this form of facilitation can be realized, it is necessary to take stock of group dynamics that Fisher and Petryk say obstruct affirmative inquiry’s values—indeed, that constitute what they call exploitative forms of inquiry. 

Fisher and Petryk observe two closely related and common forms of exploitative inquiry: experience parasitism and cultural strip mining. The former occurs when the contributions of an individual or small number of individuals become the source of energy that powers the work of the group as a whole, leading others to feed from what they offer and to cease engaging when their host is absent. The latter, cultural strip mining, happens on a group level: the viewpoints and narratives of a single, often marginalized group of people are sought as an educational resource for their peers, but without those peers offering their viewpoints or narratives in return. What makes these dynamics complex is that they often arise from good intentions: an instructor or subset of members within a classroom dialogue recognizes some member(s) as holding authority on a topic and defers to their real (or presumed) expertise. But they are exploitative in the sense that they put to work just one person or group for the benefit of others, and do not allow peers to practice the mutual risk-taking, responsibility, and benefit that can happen when people put their differing, sometimes conflicting perspectives into conversation with one another.

Punishment cannot be understood solely in terms of how it excludes but must also account for how it binds together and offers pleasure to those who punish. Referring to this form of belonging as hostile solidarity, the sociologists Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen identify how it becomes an especially attractive practice during moments of conflict and instability. In these moments, punitive actions offer senses of control, reassurance, and social solidarity and allow for the release of feelings of anger and anxiety. Hostile solidarity is a sense of sociality so potent that it distracts from the feelings of anxiety and insecurity that initially prompted the individual or group to enact punishment in the first place (Carvalho and Chamberlen, 2017). 

Hostile solidarity can manifest when potentially polarizing topics are discussed in a classroom environment that has not cultivated a sense of mutual obligation and belonging. A post-election discussion, for example, could result in some students with the same ideas about its implications banding together against a student or group of students with differing views. In this case, one group of students might unite by—and derive pleasure and meaning from—ostracizing, deriding, or otherwise excluding another student or students who dissent from the commonsense that has emerged in the classroom. One way of proactively addressing the emergence of hostile solidarity is to instead take steps toward cultivating cooperative solidarities between students—solidarities that are anchored in collaboration and the understanding and appreciation of differences as opportunities for learning.

One might think that “idle talk” refers to the informal, time-filling banter instructors and students share before class begins. But Eyo Ewara, drawing from philosophical approaches to language, provides a more critical account of idle talk as what happens when convention comes to stand in for riskier and more purposeful ways of understanding complex topics. Engaging with the ascendance of a narrow construction of anti-racism in contemporary institutions of higher education, Ewara observes that “our ameliorative, anti-racist sentiments can themselves become reflexes, habits of speech, orientation, and gesture that … can cause us to under-examine what we are speaking about or what we are doing with our speech” (Ewara, 33-34). Beyond the specific topic of anti-racism that Ewara takes up, idle talk can be seen as posing a unique instructional challenge. For teachers, the problem it represents is not that of disagreement that rises to unmanageable levels of intensity. It is instead the problem of presumed consensus and the surface-level engagements (with a subject and one another) that flow from it. 

“Society says…,” “People talk about…,” “Nowadays…,” and similar phrases are a few indices of idle talk that both instructors and students can use in the classroom. As Ewara writes, generalizations like these can represent a flattened, unengaged form of understanding that risks calcifying into indifference toward whatever subject is at hand. When this happens, topics of discussion appear as both already fully known by and far away from the speakers themselves—that is, in “society” or in some “people” that are outside the circle of conversation (Ewara, 2022). Doing justice to particularly complex subjects might require developing strategies that are able to work the drift of idle talk into more directed and difference-driven engagement—even in cases where everyone broadly agrees with each other.

This is a process that encourages students to reflect on, identify, and deconstruct dominant narratives, as well as work together on articulating counter-narratives. It works like this: divide students into groups and present them with an easily recognizable dominant narrative (a US-based example might be something like, “Individuals are solely responsible for their success or failure and can achieve anything through hard work and perseverance”); then prompt them to identify how such a narrative has become dominant and normalized. These prompts might include questions that have the students reflect on where and how this narrative circulates, what groups it benefits, what groups it harms, what narratives it silences or suppresses, how students themselves have circulated this narrative or incorporated it into their own lives, and what alternative narratives might serve as counters to the dominant one.

The advantage of this process is that it attunes students to the ways that dominant narratives form and circulate; invites historically marginalized groups to share knowledge, perspectives, and experiences on the construction of normalized ideas; and provides a structure for students to collaborate on articulating and valuing narratives that do not commonly enjoy the status of “common sense.” The disadvantage is that the process of deconstructing and reconstituting narratives will be most successful if one has first reflected extensively on the dominant narratives that already characterize one’s field, the processes by which they have become normalized, and what counter-narratives already exist. This process requires deep reflection on the part of the instructor in order to facilitate students' abilities to collaborate on and develop their own counter-narratives.

Dynamics this approach and method may address include: Experience parasitism-cultural strip-mining; idle talk; hostile solidarity

Adapted from: Nurturing Voices that Challenge the Dominant Narrative, Harvard Graduate School of Education and Dominant Narratives from Equitable Teaching at the University of Michigan

This is a tool for encouraging reflection on what one learned from a discussion. It works like this: at the end of a contentious discussion or shortly after one has concluded, distribute a set of questions to students that ask them to reflect on their experience of a conversation and any of their major takeaways from their colleagues. Instructors are encouraged to create their own questions that align with their course objectives, but common ones include: At what moment were you most engaged in the conversation? At what moment were you most distanced from it? What action or argument did you find most affirming or helpful? What did you find most puzzling or confusing? What surprised you the most?

The advantage of this tool is that it allows for metacognitive processing that encourages students to understand the discussion they are reflecting on not as an interruption in their learning but a central component of it. It also provides instructors with material for debriefing and synthesizing. The risk is that it can stretch out a discussion that does indeed need to be tabled in order to keep the course schedule on track.

Dynamics that this tool might be used to address include critique fatigue and hostile solidarity.

Adapted from Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms (Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill)

This is a tool for surfacing perspectives that someone feels are worth at least understanding, even in cases where someone may not hold these perspectives themselves. It works like this: as discussions move forward, anyone may propose that a viewpoint has been excluded, mischaracterized, or unfairly attacked—and they may propose that the group consider this viewpoint regardless of whether they personally subscribe to it. If the instructor agrees that considering this viewpoint is relevant to their learning goals, they can pause the conversation and give students five minutes to describe the merits and underlying values of this perspective without criticizing it. Students are not obligated to describe these merits, but for the duration of the exercise, only those who feel they can do so are given the floor to speak. 

The advantage of this tool is that it encourages students to articulate the values and affordances of a viewpoint without asking them to agree with, advocate for, or embody that viewpoint themselves—a process that instructors can then ask them to apply to the construction of their own perspectives. The risk is that it can be abused if one person continuously asserts the rule in order to derail a conversation. Instructors should be prepared to assess in the moment what kinds of perspectives are in fact valuable to consider in a discussion.

Dynamics that this tool might be used to address include hostile solidarity and idle talk.

Adapted from Handbook for Facilitating Difficult Conversations in the Classroom (John D. Vogelsang and Sophia McGee)

This is a process for multiplying the ways that students can engage with and contribute to a discussion. It works like this: reflect on the range of roles that it is possible for people to play in a complex or contentious conversation. In addition to people who are sharing their interpretations and perspectives on whatever topic is at hand, this might include people who work as facilitators (those who keep the conversation moving and focused); synthesizers (close listeners who observe and call attention to meaningful overlaps, divergences, and emerging questions); recorders (people who take notes on the substance of the discussion or track the social dynamics of an ongoing conversation); appliers (people who imagine creative and/or critical next steps for the group to consider); and more. Either assign students to these various roles (which can be performed individually or in teams) or allow them to elect into various roles at different points in the semester. 

The advantage of this tool is that it creates many different opportunities for students to participate in conversation, sometimes as an immediate contributor and at other times as a supporter. Doing this can turn the otherwise isolated experience of arguing for one’s individual perspective into a collaborative experience, where people practice skills like active listening, note-taking, field writing, and synthetic thinking, among others. The material generated as a result of students performing these distinct, complementary, and mutually supportive forms of engagement can also be integrated into future meetings or student projects. The risk is that it can allow students to stay only where they are most comfortable and decline from participating in some of the mutual risk-taking and perspective sharing that engaged pedagogy demands.

Dynamics that this tool might be used to address include idle talk, critique fatigue, and hostile solidarity.

Adapted from Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation (by adrienne maree brown)

This is a tool for drawing out various perspectives on an issue while deepening students’ engagement with course content. It works like this: in advance of class, the instructor identifies a series of quotes from the course content and transfers each quote to a slip of paper. Place students in small groups and give each group two quotes at random. Their task is to decide what they want to affirm or challenge in these quotes in light of their understanding of contemporary social and political conditions.

The advantage of this tool is that it combines students’ understanding of class material with their abilities to transfer that learning to new contexts, and to do so while generating a broad range of perspectives on how course material applies to new conditions and problems. The risk is that it is most useful when there are clear and robust connections between course material and a specific topic that emerges for discussion.

Dynamics that this tool might be used to address include idle talk and experience parasitism & cultural stripmining.

Adapted from Start Talking: A Handbook for Engaging Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education (edited by Kay Landis)

This is a tool for mapping multiple perspectives on a topic in a structured manner in advance of a discussion. It works like this: the instructor presents a guiding question to the class and then invites students to spend a few minutes organizing their response to it. Students then have the option (which they may decline) to share their perspective for 2-3 minutes without being interrupted. The exercise concludes not with students responding directly to each other but working together to synthesize major points that emerged, name overarching themes or values, and/or identify points of difference that require further engagement. 

The advantage of this tool is that it creates a context in which students must listen carefully to one another, aiming to identify resonances and tensions between perspectives. For the instructor, depending on how and when this tool is used, it may generate topics and questions that can be folded into later classes. The risk is that it can favor students who are already comfortable articulating their viewpoints.

Dynamics that this tool might be used to address include idle talk, hostile solidarity, and experience parasitism & cultural stripmining.

Adapted from University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Teaching and Learning

This is a process that moves a group from discussion to shared action. It works like this: in advance of engaging contentious subjects, talk with students about a range of course-appropriate ways they might translate what they learn or experience during the discussion into a project. Encourage students to think about how they might individually or in partnerships make something critical and creative from the discussion—a co-written essay, a community-engaged project, a lesson plan, an artwork or piece of media, and so on. Not only can this prepare students to enter the discussion thinking about how it will inform some action they will take, but it also encourages them to reflect on specific audiences they would want to reach or for whom they would want to translate their engagement with one another. This process can be used alone or combined with any of the tools and processes discussed above.

The advantage of this process is that, by intentionally linking discussion with action, it moves against a common and well-founded criticism of dialogue-based engagement: that discussion alone can be alienating when talking just to hear other perspectives is the only tool available or allowed. By treating discussion as a step that scaffolds up to a student-defined application, it emphasizes participants’ agency in making something from what they learned, especially when the matters are of grave concern to students. The risk is that, because this process is a form of scaffolding, it requires an instructor to incorporate flexibility into their assignment design. Such an incorporation is easier to plan for far in advance of teaching than it is to do in the moment.

Dynamics that this tool might be used to address include idle talk, hostile solidarity, critique fatigue, and experience parasitism & cultural stripmining

Inspired by discussions about radical scaffolding, counter-narration, and the possibilities and limits of deliberative pedagogy.

Boodman, E. (2019). Radical scaffolding against critique fatigue. Radical Teacher no. 115, 27-32. https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2019.669

Carvalho, H. and Chamberlen A. (2017). Why punishment pleases: Punitive feelings in a world of hostile solidarity. Punishment & Society 20(2), 217-234. https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474517699814

Ewara, E. (2022). Idle talk and anti-racism: On critical phenomenology, language, and racial justice. Puncta: journal of critical phenomenology 5(4), 32-50. https://doi.org/10.5399/PJCP.v5i4.3

Fisher, R. and Petryk, T. (2017). Balancing asymmetrical social power dynamics. IGR Working Paper Series #3, 1-15.

Flaherty C. (2023, May 23). Stress is hurting college students. Inside Higher Education. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/student-success/health-wellness/2023/05/23/survey-stress-hurting-college-students

Hubrig, A., Masterson, J., Seibert Desjarlais, S. K., Stenberg, S. J., Thielen, B. M. (2020). Disrupting Diversity Management: Toward a Difference-Driven Pedagogy. Pedagogy 20(2), 279-301. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8091903

Lipson, S.K., Zhou, S., Abelson, S., Heinze, J., Jirsa, M., Morigney, J., Patterson, A., Singh, M., Eisenberg, D. (2022, June). Trends in college student mental health and health-seeking by race/ethnicity: Findings from the national healthy minds study, 2013-2021. Journal of Affective Disorders 306(1), 138-147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2022.03.038