Making a Difference Through Dialogue
About the Institute
A difficult dialogue is an encounter among people with differing opinions, beliefs, perspectives, or world views. Difficult dialogues address the increasing polarization of our society and the need to deal more effectively with breakdowns in civil discourse.
The MU Summer Institute will provide participants with intensive, structured time to develop, foster, assess, and improve difficult dialogues within classrooms, departments and campus-wide. This Summer Institute will provide an opportunity for campuses to bring together a group of senior campus leaders – including administrators, professional staff and faculty members – to work together toward the creation of a difficult dialogues faculty development program.
Institute Development
The Difficult Dialogues Initiative (DDI) is designed to promote academic freedom and religious, cultural, and political pluralism on college and university campuses in the United States. The University of Missouri is one of a handful of universities to receive two DDI grants from the Ford Foundation. The first grant was awarded in 2005, and the renewal grant was received in 2008. This Summer Institute was designed by program leaders at the University of Missouri, in collaboration with the principal investigators of two other DDI institutional awardees at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Alaska Anchorage. Together, we have designed the Institute to provide participants with the foundational information, awareness and skills to develop DDI programs on their own campuses.
The Summer Institute will concentrate on:
- Capacity building strategies for campus-wide difficult dialogues programs at participating institutions;
- Methods and techniques to create, enhance and assess the effectiveness of faculty development and interactive theatre programs that are part of a comprehensive difficult dialogues faculty development program; and
- Foundational content areas necessary for the implementation of successful difficult dialogues faculty development programs.
Participants planning to attend the Institute should have a shared vision of the need to improve student learning through a commitment to cultural, religious and political pluralism. Institutional teams will develop implementation plans during the conference that will be used to aid in the creation of difficult dialogues programs at their home campuses.