Making Room For--and Handling--Difficult Course-Related Conversations

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This interactive workshop will support faculty to develop strategies to facilitate crucial conversations between students, connecting them to course content.

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Students can learn a lot from controversy in the classroom. Not only does it help them develop resilience in the face of conflict, it can help crystalize knowledge and open up creative thinking as they figure out how to understand diverging perspectives on course-related issues.

This workshop will focus on strategies suited for the second half of the term. Has your class established an excellent conversational rapport already, and you’re now looking for ways to work with this momentum? Do you sense that there are unspoken conflicts or content-related concerns in your class, and aren’t sure how to bring them out or work with them? Either way, we’ll discuss how to address specific issues you’re facing, and how to bring out issues you’d like your students to face. There will be a focus on how race, class, gender, disability, religion, age and sexual orientation inform controversial conversations.