Round Three of NCDD2023 Workshops Announced!

Find the next announcement of workshops for the 9th National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD2023) happening October 13-15 in Atlanta, Georgia. This conference will feature over 60 sessions in total, with two blocks of concurrent sessions daily over the three days we convene. The overall schedule can be found at ncdd.org/2023schedule.html. Below is an alphabetical listing of the next round of sessions and find the full line-up on the conference workshop page at: www.ncdd.org/2023workshops.html.

Adding Polarity Management to Your Deliberative Toolkit
All Levels
Too often, issues are framed to drive us apart with “either-or” answers. But a “both-and” mindset is achievable, especially at the local level. This workshop will introduce wicked problems and polarity management and share stories of how these tools can be applied. Participants will then work in smaller groups to engage with key polarities, whether they’re tough public issues or tensions within the field of dialogue and deliberation itself. See how polarities can be used as a liberating lens for leaders, a generative frame for facilitation, and a hands-on tool for navigating issues and ultimately, identifying more sustainable solutions.

Martin Carcasson, PhD. - Director; Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation
Susan Clark - Community Consultant; Author of Slow Democracy

AI and Your Dialogue and Deliberation Practice: Partnering for Content Development and Decision Making
All Levels
This workshop will be in two parts. In the first section, we will explore using GPT-4 for idea generation around communication strategies for addressing various contexts of dialogue and deliberation. Special attention will be given to prompt development, prompt followup and fact checking. The second section will explore how AI integrations with meeting software like Read.ai offer summaries and action items. Participants are encouraged to share their experience with AI platforms.

Philip Bakelaar, PhD. - Adjunct Professor; Montclair State University School of Communication and Media
Stephen Buckley - Collaboration Engineer; Independent Consultant

Beyond Unity and Forgiveness: Creating Space for Conflict in the Classroom
All Levels
How do we create classroom environments – and other dialogic spaces – where people can engage in conflict in a productive manner? In this session, we will share stories of conflict from our class on dialogue that challenge the notion that unity and forgiveness are the most desirable goals in dialogue. Students experience greater growth and learning when their views are challenged, but how do facilitators create a safe environment for conflict to occur while also attending to the dynamics of race, power and worldview differences? Moreover, how do facilitators teach students to attend to these dynamics, to become more aware of, and have a deeper understanding of the ways that race, power, and worldview differences shape our experiences and narratives? How do we learn from these differences, and grow in our understanding of one another, without striving for the kind of unity that silences important differences? 

Alison Castel, PhD. - Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications; Regis University
Erin Nourse, PhD. - Associate Professor of Religious Studies; Regis University

Building Community in Times of Chaos
All Levels
From pandemic-induced social isolation to mass protest, the Kettering Foundation convened an international virtual cohort of librarians to discuss libraries' role in deliberative democracy. Librarians from the US, Ukraine, and Romania shared stories of confronting societal challenges with dialogue. What began as an exchange of ideas evolved into a brave, restorative space where we could face our fears, bolster our courage, and advocate for our communities. Having a community of practice to navigate the shifting societal tectonic plates allowed the cohort to recommit and renew their community-building efforts and leverage partnerships to deepen civic engagements in urban and rural settings.

Erica Freudenberger - Outreach and Engagement Consultant; Southern Adirondack Library System
Ellen Knutson - Adjunct Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences; University of Illinois
Ileana Marin - Program Officer; Kettering Foundation
David Siders - Civic Engagement Coordinator; Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library

Connecting Campus and Community: Collaborative Dialogues for Community-Based Racial Repair
All Levels
How might communities have the difficult conversations surrounding topics of racial repair, equity, and reparations? And how can colleges and universities become better facilitators and motivators for their local communities in these efforts? These questions are especially important today, as communities struggle to come to terms with their contested histories—while they also face mounting pressures to ignore or disavow those histories. Wesleyan College has used the Interactivity Foundation’s model of collaborative discussions to change our campus climate over the past decade. In this workshop, we will share how this same collaborative discussion model helped us to forge new ties with our local community in Macon, Georgia. 

Over the past two years, as part of our work with the Mellon Foundation’s Crafting Democratic Futures project, we’ve partnered with the Tubman African American Museum to create community discussions around racial repair and reparations, particularly symbolic reparations related to telling the marginalized histories of Macon's African American communities. Members of Wesleyan College’s Lane Center for Social and Racial Equity, Tubman Museum leadership, and our Macon community partners will share how our community engagement was structured in this interactive, dialogue-based session. As a small Southern U.S. college taking on big issues in solidarity with our local community, we will engage the session participants in a participatory dialogue about the challenges and successes of our work, and share how this approach could extend to similar work elsewhere.

Jeff Bruce - Director of Exhibitions; Tubman African American Museum
Holly Cole - Associate Professor of Psychology; Wesleyan College
Melanie Doherty - Rufus K. and Jane Mulkey Green Professor of English; Wesleyan College
Tonya Parker - Chief Diversity Officer; Wesleyan College

Expanding the Movement: Beyond Dialogue & Deliberation
All Levels
As we reconnect and reflect, we are also invited to renew our commitment to bring the wisdom of dialogue & deliberation to address the urgent needs of democracy. Nonetheless, the dialogue & deliberation movement can't make the necessary changes alone. There are adjacent movements striving to save democracy and it is time to expand. These other movements hold parts of the puzzle that we need, and we have the pieces of the puzzle that they need. 

This session will explore how the dialogue & deliberation movement can deepen and expand collaboration with other movements to generate true transformation. Join with leaders from various fields to learn about the work they're doing and explore the ways we can grow our impact through cross-sector collaboration. The adjacent movements of interest include conflict transformation (addressing the root issues & bridging divides), popular media (raising mainstream awareness), technology (large scale collaboration & sensemaking), and politics & governance (citizen participation and postpartisan independent politics).

This session will invert the standard panel presentation. Participants and field leaders will begin in open discussion and transition into a structured participatory Q&A discussion, where we can envision what's possible. The session will conclude with the leaders speaking on a panel sharing about the ideas they heard and the best ways to seed potential collaborations into the future.

Duncan Autrey - Founder and Host; Omni-Win Project​
Nick Coccoma - Communications; Assemble America
Seth Adam Cohen - Executive Director; Assemble America
Raye Rawls -  Fanning Institute Senior Public Service Associate; University of Georgia
Scott Vineberg - Founder and CEO; PeoplePower.tv

Facts Don’t Change Minds; Considering the Unarguable
Intermediate
Journalists (and others) tend to sit firmly in the belief that facts matter more than anything and they are absolute, unarguable. And because of this, journalists (and others) tend to believe they should be trusted for their objectivity or neutrality. A growing body of research is teaching us more about how humans make decisions, how we create and hold opinions: we take our cues from those around us, we are tribal and social in our "knowing." Facts matter far less than we thought; a blow to traditional practices of journalism, a blow to how many of us like to think of ourselves as we navigate dialogue and deliberation. Knowing that relationships precede trust and facts don't change minds, how can we work most effectively to restore the civil and community fabric of our communities? What strategies are most helpful? What does work? 

What if the unarguable is not, as Dr. Julie Colwell, founder of the Evolutionary Power Institute, a piece of information or a fact, but rather feelings and sensations, the way our breath catches, our stomach aches. What can we learn for the field of dialogue and deliberation when the unarguable is internal, somatic? Our fear or worry more real than the federal budget, more real than the facts of the school board policy on books? Join Spaceship Media's Eve Pearlman and Dr. Colwell for an exploration of what we can learn by grounding ourselves in our bodies as we design, create and host dialogues.  

Julie Colwell, PhD. - Founder; Evolutionary Power Institute
​Eve Daniel Pearlman - CEO; Spaceship Media

From Head to Heart and Hands: Engaging Intellectuals in Dialogue
All Levels
Intellectuals are often trapped on the treadmill of ideas. Academic success in the form of funding, advancement, external rewards and internal satisfaction all hinges on the life of the mind. Given this, how to meaningfully engage intellectuals in the balance of head, heart, and hands that is required for dialogue? This session tells the story of Game Changer Academies, a program developed for the National Science Foundation to support deliberative democracy in the peer review process. We will describe and demonstrate how we have engaged engineers in reflection and dialogue to improve group process, understand the importance of social identity, and be productive participants in conflict and deliberation for the public good.

Diana Kardia - Founder and Lead Designer; Kardia Group LLC: Leadership and Change in Academia
Kelly Mack - Vice President, Undergraduate STEM Education; Project Kaleidoscope Executive Director, American Association of Colleges and Universities

How Can Dialogue Change Institutionalized Forms of Injustice?
All Levels
How do we bring dialogue into the places where structures and systems are created? Into spaces where decisions are made? Into the practice of busy people who already define their world through strong expertise - but not the kind that lends to dialogue? How can professional development strategies make use of dialogue principles to help dismantle institutionalized forms of injustice? In this session we will (1) demonstrate curricular designs we’ve developed to address these questions, (2) engage participants in brief experiments that demonstrate the underlying principles, and (3) foster exchange of ideas and strategies.  The goal of this work is to support those in positions of expertise, power, and influence to understand and embed dialogue in the heart of their work in order to create a just, equitable, and meaningfully diverse society. 

Elizabeth Cole - Director, National Center for Institutional Diversity; Professor, University of Michigan
Diana Kardia - Founder and Lead Designer; Kardia Group LLC: Leadership and Change in Academia

National Dialogue: Building a Framework for Inclusive Dialogue in Haiti Through Participatory-Action Research
All Levels
How do we build the deliberative capacity of those that lack a culture of dialogue? This session provides insights on a participatory-action research project that explores how public deliberation and social capital can lead to the development of a participant-generated framework for an inclusive dialogue in Haiti. The presenters will share preliminary findings and lessons learned through the action-research project and discuss how the framework can be applied to other similar situations. 

Kimberley Allonce - Doctoral Candidate; University of Central Florida
Saurel Quettan - Board Development Chair; Georgia Haitian-American Chamber of Commerce

Testimony and Listening as Wellness Practices: Reimagining Presence
All Levels
How can crafting and sharing your story support wellness? How can we learn to listen to another's story without trying to extract something from it? In this interactive, multi-modal session, we will explore what it means to bring a testimonial ethos to dialogue -- and how doing so facilitates individual and collective healing by restoring autonomy to the speaker and presence to the listener. Aided by visual media and recorded testimonies, we will practice skills for non-extractive, embodied listening and learn an effective model for sharing and receiving testimony. 

Lia Howard, PhD. - Student Advising and Wellness Director; SNF Paideia Program, University of Pennsylvania
Sarah Ropp - Dialogue Director; SNF Paideia Program, University of Pennsylvania

The Civic Lab – Strengthening Youth Engagement in Your Community
All Levels
Come join us for an interactive session with Troy University students as they demonstrate activities from our Civic Lab Toolkit. The Civic Lab engages students in grades 3 through 8, as well as college students, in dialogue and learning experiences with a strong focus on civic education, community inclusion, understanding bias, and current public issues. In this session, participants will learn how to foster civic engagement in their communities through meaningful partnerships with local youth organizations.  

Lauren Cochran - Coordinator, Office of Civic Engagement; Troy University
Reyna Harris - Student and Civic Scholar, Office of Civic Engagement; Troy University 
Chauntina Whittle - Troy University Student;  Intern, David Mathews Center for Civic Life

The Power of Language: Speaking to Difference & Similarity
All Levels
Storytelling, through dialogue, has the power to set the foundation for the more challenging, yet necessary conversations. Without basic understanding of each other first, such as the core values of who we are as people, anything else becomes unproductive for the collective and potential of future relationship building. This roundtable will begin with us sharing about our experience in polarized political dynamics, but also include experiences of working in communities where people use social justice "buzzwords" as well as how both ends of the spectrum call for internalizing the work as humans through storytelling.

Marquelle Ogletree - Student Co-Director; University of Florida Changemakers' Dialogue Program
Joey Puell - Student Co-Director; University of Florida Changemakers' Dialogue Program
Arleen Rodriguez-Portal - Student Co-Director; University of Florida Changemakers' Dialogue Program
Manda Wittebort - Program Coordinator, Brown Center for Leadership & Service; University of Florida Changemakers' Dialogue Program

Using Dialogue to Meet Emergent Moments in Secondary Schools
All Levels
Teachers and school leaders face intense, unprecedented challenges today. They have to meet their core educational and civic goals. They are also crucial for the emotional and psychological development of students. They strive to cultivate cultures of belonging in one of the most diverse spaces in our society. They work in often tense collaboration with parents and community stakeholders. And they serve as the unofficial first responders in moments of national crisis.

What teachers and leaders need are tangible, practical tools to meet these challenges in the particular ways they show up in their own classrooms, schools, and districts. EP's Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD) is one such tool, currently being used by middle and high schools, educators, students and administrators across the country to create more inclusive, open, and resilient school cultures. In this interactive presentation, participants will hear real-world cases of students, teachers, and administrators deploying RSD to meet challenges, empower students, and enrich the cultures of their middle and high schools. Speakers will share their own stories and challenges as well as the innovations they have developed and insights from their practice. 

Participants of the session will then have the chance to strategize the application of frameworks, strategies, and insights—those drawn from the speakers as well as those they themselves bring—in small groups, with several scenarios as prompts. The hope is to bridge the gap between abstract learning and real-world application in their own contexts.

Nadiya Brock - Program Manager; Essential Partners
Danielle Johnson-Webb - Director of Equity and Community Engagement, Cary Academy

You like Patriotism, You like Activism, We like Unity: Exploring Similarities and Differences in How American Voters Resonate with Key Civic Terms
All Levels
Knowing how different groups of Americans perceive civic terms can be helpful in designing and facilitating inclusive dialogue and deliberation experiences. In 2021, PACE fielded a national survey to understand how Americans perceive 21 commonly used civic terms. In this session, participants will explore themes from the PACE survey and engage in conversations about some of the key questions and areas of curiosity that arise from the data. 

Amy McIsaac - Managing Director of Learning and Experimentation; Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement