To build trust, relationships, and healthy conversation opportunities and skills so JMU students can have better conversations together across ideological and cultural divides.

After participating in a Better Conversations Together: Dialogue session, students will:

• Recognize how to have civil, productive conversations across differences;
• Be able to express their views to someone with different views in ways that are relatable and understandable to that person;
• Be able to actively listen to and understand views that are different from their own;
• Experience and productively navigate tensions and disagreements that come from conversing with those who carry other experiences and backgrounds.

Being able to have a conversation with people who are different is a vital twenty-first century civic, workplace, and life skill. The ability to hear contrary views, to disagree with those views, and even to offer contrary views is a skill critical for democratic citizenship.

However, when students turn on the TV or view their social media feeds, the political discourse they see often looks like screaming matches, insult factories, or is full of misinformation. JMU students are left wondering what productive disagreement is and how they can meaningfully talk with others.

With Better Conversations Together: Dialogue, we attempt to create an intimate space where pairs of students can have real conversations about difficult issues. Like James Madison, our students are also paradoxes, holding incongruent views, or views that may be seen by others as problematic, difficult to understand, or antithetical to someone else's values. And yet, we each bring something unique and important to each conversation we have. It is in those differences that learning happens about the complexity of issues and about how to navigate others’ views.

Students will apply to be a part of a Better Conversations Together: Dialogue program by completing an interest form and short biography. Once participants are selected for a conversation, the Dialogue team will pair students together based on their backgrounds, views on issues and schedule availability.

Conversations run about 30-45 minutes in length and are lightly facilitated by a trained peer facilitator.  Participants begin the conversation by reading each other’s biographies and are asked to share something that they left out of their writing. The facilitator will then help participants share their views, ask each other curious questions, and explore differences in views before finding common ground. Participants have the option of audio recording the conversation and using pseudonyms for publication.

For general questions, please contact the Post-Graduate Fellow Casey Shull (shullcl@jmu.edu). 

To bring Better Conversations Together: Dialogue into your classroom or student organization meeting, please contact Post-Graduate Fellow, Casey Shull (shullcl@jmu.edu) or the Madison Center’s Interim Associate Director, Dr. Monica McEnerny (mcenerml@jmu.edu).