You know how at Thanksgiving dinner everyone is trained to avoid the touchy subjects – politics, religion, money?
Society teaches us to dodge sensitive topics of discussion to maintain civil and peaceful relationships in the workplace, our neighborhoods and our families.
That needs to change, said Johanna Solomon, assistant professor at Kent State’s School of Peace and Conflict Studies.
“We need to be talking about those things,” she said, and we need to be able to talk about them with civility.
The Community Dialogue Workshop, a three-day event that starts today at the Kent State University Hotel and Conference Center, will allow attendees to learn and practice the art of civil dialogue – learning to have difficult conversations to bring people together.
“Dialogue is something I feel passionate about,” Solomon said, “I’ve seen it change lives.”
The event is being sponsored by the Peace and Conflict Studies school, in collaboration with Hands Across the Hills, the Growing Democracy Project and Kent State’s Department of Political Science.
About 55 people are expected to attend the workshop, including graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, administrators and community leaders from across the country, to learn techniques and skills for leading community dialogue.
Solomon, the workshop’s lead organizer, hopes to host the event biannually, and said organizers were surprised by the number of attendees who registered. Many attendees hope to help facilitate peaceful discourse to effect change in their own communities.
At a time when uncivil discourse is often the norm, Solomon said there is a real need to teach others how to talk to those with whom they disagree, and how to bring people together for difficult conversations.
“It allows us to humanize each other to see that we share more in common than we might originally have thought,” Solomon said.
Learn more about the conference at www.kentstatedialogue.com.
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