Teaching skills for challenging times

About 80 first-year students arrived on campus this fall with an extra tool in their social and academic toolkits: practice engaging with their classmates in thoughtful conversation about controversial issues. This experience was courtesy of the Summer Frosh Civil Dialogues Program, organized by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, part of the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, and the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.

“The skills I learned in Civil Dialogues are translating seamlessly to both discussions in my classes for the liberal arts program Structured Liberal Education and my very technical computer science class, which I didn't expect when I did the program,” said frosh Stuti Desai. “My program facilitator encouraged us to look at issues from multiple angles, especially ones we generally wouldn't weigh heavily. At the same time, she taught us to think systemically and come to ideas based on truly examined and rigorous foundations.” 

Facilitated by Stanford students and recent alumni, the program was delivered on Zoom over four weeks. It was built on existing extracurricular programs offered through the McCoy Center that model meaningful conversation on challenging issues. The civil dialogues program also supports a concerted effort by Stanford to provide its students with a strong foundation in how to have civil discourse, an important—and, some worry, disappearing—practice.

“All of us would like to think that we are open to engage with others who disagree and that we are somewhat good at it when we do” said R. Lanier Anderson, Stanford’s interim vice provost for undergraduate education, the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in Humanities, and professor of philosophy in H&S. “But the times are teaching us that we all have room for improvement. VPUE was happy to partner with the ethics center to bring this program to new students.”

Collin Anthony Chen, director of graduate and undergraduate programs at the McCoy Center, organized the program specifically to be delivered in the summer. 

“We wanted to create a space where students could try out different ideas with their peers in a lower-stakes environment,” Anthony Chen said. “The goal is to build confidence for students to ask questions from a place of curiosity and to listen with empathy.”

Serving up Stanford research on dialogue and disagreement

Participants and facilitators were chosen from a large pool of applicants, demonstrating strong student interest. Eleven facilitators then led groups of about seven students. Many of the facilitators had some background in ethics, and all received additional training from Anthony Chen on how to lead nuanced conversations on difficult issues. 

The program’s curriculum included active listening techniques and guided application to clearly defined, but controversial, issues. Each group worked through four case studies, chosen based on student interest, and then students explored their own and their peers’ perspectives on detailed written scenarios foregrounding issues such as transgender health care, regulation of social media, and the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban. Anthony Chen said many tenets of the program’s model originated at Stanford, stemming from the research on partisanship and polarization by social scientists including Robb Willer and Jamil Zaki.

Among the program facilitators were Ursula Neuner, a senior majoring in symbolic systems and minoring in ethics in society who is president of the Stanford Practical Ethics Club, and Sophia Pribus ’24, who was a Bioethics Fellow at the McCoy Center and will enter Stanford School of Medicine next fall.

Both said they asked participants to imagine themselves in different positions relative to the case study—to put themselves in the shoes of a family member or a doctor, for example—to spark insights into how people might arrive at conflicting opinions on issues based on their distinct experiences. Another tactic was to move to generalized values in search of mutual understanding to counterbalance disagreement over specifics. 

“People can almost always agree on some baseline moral intuition,” Neuner explained, crediting the Stanford course Justice for the insight. “Even in some of the most contentious issues of today, the left and the right both see themselves on the side of protecting lives or people, although they go about it in different ways. There’s almost always some common ground, and if the goal is to find that common ground before instantly becoming adversarial, you can avoid a lot of the difficulties.”

The new Stanford students quickly warmed to the conversational approaches modeled in the course, the facilitators said.

“There were a lot of conflicting perspectives, but without very much interference, the students were able to find consensus even while maintaining distinct viewpoints,” Pribus said. 

Optimism for the future

Both facilitators said they had become more optimistic about the prospects for difficult conversations, at least at Stanford, after helping lead the course.

“This program is such a good idea because it will help people before they even get to Stanford to have tools that they can use and share to constantly improve these conversations and maybe to get to a point where we can avoid pockets of more extreme dialogue,” Pribus said. 

If the program continues to be offered in future years, it will create a growing network of students who can help steer open and thoughtful peer-to-peer exchanges even when interlocutors’ sources and values diverge. 

“It makes me optimistic; it makes me realize that it’s possible,” Neuner said. “If we could have more skill programs like this reaching out to more diverse members of the population—maybe it is possible to combat polarization.”