National Dialogue Project

Institutional Profiles

The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
Envisioning Lives of Engagement

Over the course of the 2003-2004 academic year, the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey will hold a series of five dialogues around the theme, Envisioning Lives of Engagement, to set the foundation for the formal and sustained integration of civic education and engagement throughout the curriculum and campus life. Envisioning Lives of Engagement will involve the entire campus in this yearlong project to put the broad notion of civic engagement at the center of the academic core. The dialogues will bring together multiple stakeholders—faculty, students, administrators, community college partners, and community leaders— in an effort to probe deeply into the meaning, value, and strategies of civic education and explore the power of active citizenship in contributing to the public good.

Each dialogue will focus on one of the following topic areas:

1. Civic Engagement during the Freshman Year. This dialogue will seek to determine the most meaningful pedagogies for civic education and engagement from the very beginning of a student's post-secondary education.
2. Partnerships with Community Colleges. Since many of the students at Stockton transfer from three area community colleges, this dialogue will aim to improve the present civic engagement courses and programs at each institution, as well as augment their numbers.
3. Alumni Civic Engagement Dialogue. This dialogue will foster an environment for discussion between alumni actively engaged in their communities, the director of Alumni Relations, and a subcommittee of the Task Force. The goal is to assess how well Stockton students are prepared for civic engagement and how to better prepare them in the future.
4. Community Dialogue. This dialogue will provide an avenue for the multiple stakeholders to express their views on effective participation in the public arena.
5. Civic Engagement within the Curriculum. Stockton faculty, who are also local government officials, will speak to their students on engaging them with fundamental democratic questions through classroom discussions and practical experiences in local communities.

The dialogues will be organized to lead to an action plan designed to create intentional civic engagement outcomes for students through coursework, out of classroom activities, experiential learning, and co-curricular or club-based opportunities.

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St. Lawrence University
The Regional Newspaper as a Forum for Civic Engagement: Local, National, and Global

St. Lawrence University's dialogue project will partner students with community members to probe issues reported in its regional newspaper, The Watertown Times. Exploring how local concerns are embedded in larger national and global dynamics will promote a dialogue that emphasizes the importance of civic engagement on a scale that is accessible to all citizens.

St. Lawrence University has a long history of commitment to the local rural region of the North Country, which it has proven through its Service Learning Program. While students interact with the community as service providers through the program, they do not recognize the connection between the local community and their campus, nor do they see a connection between local community issues and the democratic process taking place at the national level. The central strategy for the dialogues is to bring together participants for a series of facilitated dialogues to discuss issues important to the local community and discover how those issues relate to regional, national, and global events. Topics identified in The Watertown Times will provide a centralized focus for the dialogues.

The project participants will be students, faculty, and diverse representatives from the local community. Students will be selected from a number of classes that examine intercultural and global studies, as well as the politics of family and welfare reform. The faculty representatives of the project will be from the Service Learning Program, U.S. Studies Program, Global Studies, Speech and Theatre, Government Departments, and the Oral Communications Institute. Various members of the local community with diverse backgrounds will be recruited through the local media and government agencies to join the teachers and students in their efforts to effectively engage in active community participation.

At the conclusion of the dialogues, St. Lawrence University hopes that it will provide a model the can be replicated in the future to bring different segments of the University into conversation with members of the local community to address serious problems the region faces and emphasize the need for community-based activism.

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University of Massachusetts Boston

A series of six dialogue circles will connect faculty, students, and communities associated with UMass Boston's three Ethnic Studies programs (Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, and Latino Studies) with the university's Service-Learning initiatives to explore the relationships between ethnic studies programs and service-learning that foster democratic relationships within communities.

Each circle of the project will have a specific purpose in the dialogue series.

1. Circle One will serve as a community-building vehicle, where the participants will brainstorm to ensure coordination and synergy throughout the year.
2. Circle Two will consist of a one-day symposium to ensure that multiple community perspectives inform the public's learning, planning, and action.
3. Circle Three will specifically engage faculty in a dialogue about how global themes and perspectives intersect with both ethnic studies and service learning paradigms and practices in the curriculum.
4. Circle Four will consider the role of service learning in the design of the new course and will also consider the feminist perspectives on engagements in a multicultural community.
5. Circle Five will be the climax of the dialogue series. It will bring together an invited panel of nationally renowned faculty who represent best practices in linking ethnic studies and service learning with students, faculty, staff, and community members at UMASS Boston. The dialogue will take two shapes: formally through a highly visible, public panel discussion and informally through specific consultations.
6. Circle Six will be the last circle, and it will evaluate the impact of the project and reflect on lessons gained through the process with specific consideration of how ethnic studies and service learning collaborations will continue and expand.

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University of Michigan

The University of Michigan's action-focused dialogues will bring together students and community members with representatives of independent curricular and co-curricular programs, service-learning efforts, and multicultural and leadership initiatives to explore the creation of purposeful, sustained, developmentally-sound civic learning pathways for undergraduate and graduate students. The dialogues will explore the question, "What kind of education prepares graduates for effective participation in a diverse, complex democracy?"

Each one of Michigan's dialogues will last one day, inclusive of between 40-60 faculty, staff, and students at the university. The dialogues will also include selected community members currently involved in civic engagement projects. The first of three dialogues will be launched in November 2003, with the highly visible Dewey Lecture that focuses attention on higher education's role in supporting a diverse democracy and honors the former Michigan faculty member and renowned editor, John Dewey.

The dialogues will consist of full group as well as small group sessions, where professional facilitators will ensure that the dialogues are productive, inclusive spaces. A planning group made up of the members of the Provost's Faculty Committee on Education for a Diverse Democracy will determine dialogue themes, the agenda, its facilitators, and participants.

The over-arching goal of the initiative is to develop a learning community that will be a replicable model for student civic development and its integration into higher education.

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University of South Dakota

Using multiple entities on campus, the University of South Dakota will organize a series of four dialogues during the course of the 2003-04 academic year. Each dialogue will focus on a topic that is relevant to civic learning at the university, and the discussion will direct how those issues and values can be incorporated into undergraduate education.

Each dialogue will focus on one of the following topic areas:

1. The First Amendment on the University Campus. The first dialogue will take place in September 2003 at the Neuharth Center. The event will discuss freedom of speech on campuses and in the media.
2. Democratic Nation-Building. The second dialogue will focus on democratic nation-building endeavors and the reasons for their intensive, extensive, and expensive nature.
3. Democracy in Indian Country. Held on a Tribal College campus, the third dialogue will be a symposium examining the unique circumstances facing democratic institutions and their American Indian constituents in order for democracy can best serve Indian communities. The symposium will also examine the power of the vote from the Indian country, based on the results of the last general election in which the Indian vote was the swing vote in several critical races.
4. Curriculum Development and Campus Issues. The last dialogue will focus on models of success, academic and legal issues, and the unique challenges and opportunities that face institutions in rural areas in order to address increased civic engagement.

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Virginia Wesleyan College
Is Democracy a Dinosaur?

Partnering with the DSC Community Mediation Center, a not-for-profit community mediation center, Virginia Wesleyan will hold four facilitated dialogues (Study Circles), which will model the democratic process and lead to a civic education requirement in its core curriculum. Along with the 60 certified community volunteers from the mediation center, Virginia Wesleyan will bring together a cross section of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community partners to plan and implement the project.

Modeling the dialogues after the Study Circles Resource Center, DSC will ensure that the dialogues model civic engagement by allowing each participant to have an equal voice and the opportunity to understand other's views.

Centrally focused on the theme, Is Democracy a Dinosaur?, the topics of the dialogues will be as follows:

Dialogue 1 will raise questions about the relevancy of democracy, engaging participants in discussing whether or not a good citizen looks out for him/herself and avoids public life.

Dialogue 2 will begin by looking at the models and consequences of this "bystander syndrome."

Dialogue 3 will counter with the question "Why should I engage?" and focus on the transformative power of engagement.

Dialogue 4, the concluding dialogue, will consider "What role should higher education play in the development of engaged citizens?" The discussion will center on the ways in which Virginia Wesleyan can enhance its academic program to routinely inspire students to become involved in the lives of their community and the world beyond.

The goals for the dialogues are to raise faculty consciousness about their role in disseminating knowledge about the public good and implement pervasive change on the institutional level by changing the core curriculum and adjusting the mission statement.

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Wagner College
The Partnership for Learning, Leadership and Civic Engagements (PLACE)

Wagner College will expand and strengthen its courses on community-based learning with a series of dialogues on the values of democracy and the power to change through engagement. The project entitled PLACE will be embedded in semester-long public partnerships throughout the curriculum at the college. Student, faculty, staff, alumni, and community partners will explore engaged knowledge in order to argue for the responsibility of liberal education to promote active citizens and civic-minded professionals.

The PLACE initiative will support two sets of thematic dialogues, one in each semester. The two series of dialogues will focus on inter-related components that will build on one another to promote pedagogies for democratic education. The dialogue topics will be:

1. Faculty and Staff Development. In the Fall 2003, small internal dialogues between faculty, staff, and students about pedagogies and practices of democracy will provide insight for a larger, public conversation. The culminating Faculty and Staff Development dialogue will provide all members of the campus with new insights into the civic mission of the institution and provide opportunities for employees to learn about the multiple ways of promoting civic engagement in the workplace, professions, and community.
2. Community-Campus Dialogues. This second group of dialogues in the Spring 2003 will build upon the Fall dialogues, by developing a definition of "civic engagement" that can be understood by higher education as well as the public. Following smaller internal dialogues, a larger series of public campus-community dialogues will be held to initiate the creation of a compact on civic engagement between Wagner College and its partners in the Staten Island Community.

In addition to the dialogues, Wagner will offer four courses that are based on public partnerships. The courses include two history courses, a freshman theater course, and a senior capstone course. These courses will serve as models for course development by pioneering methods to establish stronger bonds with community groups and deepen students' civic engagement.

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