Why We Need to Talk

In the 30 years I’ve been teaching, much has changed, but one thing that remains the same is the need for educators to be well-equipped to facilitate and navigate productive and meaningful discussions about difficult topics.

Two factors make it arguably even more important than ever: one is the divisive and hostile environment that characterizes the broader national discourse on social issues, and the other is that students increasingly report greater difficulty and anxiety initiating, engaging in, and sustaining conversations.

Source: Vitaly Gariev/ Unsplash

We know that good, clear writing comes from good, clear thinking, and we know that rich, in-depth discussions help contribute to critical thinking skills and more effective writing. Conversations that nurture curiosity, nuance, and depth help students access these things outside the classroom as well.

When I refer here to classroom conversations, I’m talking about ones that can exist in any modality, including face-to-face, hybrid, and asynchronously online. Aspects of all these formats both constrain and enable open conversations, but the point of this article is that the necessity of supporting faculty to best support students’ active engagement in civil dialogue transcends classroom formats. Topics needn’t be super divisive or political to still be fraught and intense to deal with when teaching.

The writer Paulo Coelho reminds us that: “The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories.”

Coelho’s clarion call can certainly be applied to cultivating the best pedagogical practice, understanding that the memorable moments in any classroom are via conversations—often spontaneous, naturally emergent, organic happenings—when we can touch that sacred space that educator Parker Palmer talks about when he says that good teaching is about the convergence of the head and the heart and the relationships teachers create with their students.

A lot is demanded of us as faculty who want to be successful in facilitating complex conversations about charged topics. Faculty need to be willing to take risks, acknowledge and reduce fear and uncertainty in students and ourselves, stay open, be willing to be vulnerable, admit when we don’t know the answer to something, and to be willing to reveal one’s stance when necessary, especially when it’s used to defuse tension in class.

For example, as much as I strive for student-driven discussions, years ago, I had a male student who insisted on minimizing and denying the impact of rape to the extent that I brought in FBI statistics to cut through that noise and to articulate a perspective that helped differentiate fact from fiction and build empathy. In this situation, I used a blend of compassion and confrontation to help ground what was swirling around.

To be most effective, we must acknowledge and understand the extent to which there is an emotional life of the classroom. This is contested, ever-shifting terrain in which grief, rage, and disclosures all emerge.

There are techniques that faculty can employ to establish a foundation for good classroom conversations. To the extent that it’s possible for everyone to sit in a circle in an in-person class, that’s best. It helps to create some ground rules so everyone knows what to expect in terms of privacy, confidentiality, and respect. In online and in-person classes, I emphasize that the best conversations in and out of the classroom happen when there is trust, and I stress that students can and should talk about the materials and themes outside of class, but shouldn’t attach anything identifiable to individuals.

Another thing that helps build trust in face-to-face classes and hybrid classes with an in-person component is to restrict technology so that students cannot disappear into their devices or record their peers sharing vulnerable things. This highlights that conversations of all kinds are deepened when people actually pay attention to each other with presence and an ethic of care.

Education Essential Reads

To Type or to Write, That Is the Question

Why Kids Can't Resist Cognitive Offloading

There are strategies that faculty can draw on to integrate discussion, critical thinking, writing, and reflection. For example, in face-to-face classes of no more than 35 people, I’ve provided writing prompts and asked students to do in-class writing without putting their names on the sheet of paper. Then I collect everyone’s responses, put them in a basket or bowl, shuffle them, and walk back around the classroom asking each student to pick one. If they get their own, I ask them to pick again. Then, we go around and everyone reads from the paper they selected. In this way, all voices are in the room, and even the students who tend to be the least vocal have to read, and it’s usually much less daunting since they’re reading someone else’s words. By extension, the most talkative students are immediately less domineering amidst an exercise like this.

In online classes, I always try to have at least one discussion board on which students can post anonymously. In a course on deviance, I’ve asked what they’ve ever done in their lives that they or others would consider to be deviant, and I’ve asked what they would like to engage in that seems deviant if they could get away with it. Yes, in one semester, it seemed that everyone wanted to have group sex and rob a bank. The exercise is fun and informative, and I use it to help reveal the extent to which deviance is socially constructed. Anonymous online discussions can be a way to gather raw responses that we can then unpack in a disciplined way to uncover societal patterns.

In face-to-face and online classes where I’ve taught about oppression, I start by asking them to recall a moment when they were small children and asked an adult about someone they noticed to be different from them. I ask students to recall what they asked, the reactions they got, and the answers they were told. This lays the groundwork for exploring ideological, interpersonal, institutional, and internalized oppression. By handling it this way, the stress of talking about these issues is mitigated because, for example, it would be hard for someone to lash out at the six or eight-year-old self of a classmate and what they wondered about as a child or the response given to them. The conversation grows out of the common human experience of othering that starts so early on, and it’s easier to see and feel the tender humanity in the room.

It’s essential for the college experience to be one where students deepen and extend their capacity for conversation. Faculty play a critical role in holding space for students to do this—to overcome fears, to cultivate a sense of voice and positionality, and to use the skills of conversation to craft more meaningful professional and personal relationships.