Our First Dialogue Experience

A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to do something unique that allowed us to put our “I am __ but also __” conversations into practice. Our 495 class was asked to go into a Comm 201 class and facilitate a dialogue session.

This was my first experience being a part of a dialogue session, much less leading a group, but I felt like it went really well. We split ourselves into 4 groups and the Comm 201 class was split into 4 groups. We started out by explaining last year’s project and then told them about this year’s project. Our group wasn’t familiar with the project last year, but they were fairly talkative and willing to share their opinions on identity issues. Most of them admitted that they had felt stereotyped at one point or another in their life.

One of the questions we asked them was “do you recall a time when you were discouraged from discussing/asking questions about identity?” The group had a hard time coming up with specific examples, but they felt like these issues are often hard to discuss because they require you to dig beneath the surface and enter into a more serious conversation, which is the goal of our project. One girl said that it’s not exactly “dinner table conversation.” She said it wasn’t something that her and her friends choose to discuss frequently because there is a level of discomfort and it can also affect relationships. Our group also said it’s hard to talk about identity issues sometimes because people have changing identities. They also discussed how it’s hard to rise above expectations and stereotypes at times. At the end of the session, we gave group members the option to fill out a “I am ____ but also ____” notecard.

I found the dialogue session to be very insightful and helpful to our project. We will be holding dialogue sessions at our culminating event, so this was good practice. I’m excited to be a part of more conversations to come as we make people aware of our campaign through conversations on the library bridge, wearing our T-shirts and buttons and leading discussions during our culminating event on April 25^th.