Presentation:

Welcoming Conflict in the Classroom

Conflict is not a bad thing.  The important issue is how to respond.
An important goal in the classroom is to air disagreements rather than police them.  When we keep the conversation going, we have more opportunities to help students understand their own positions and the impact of them.

Encouraging professors to use the classroom as a forum in which students can thoughtfully and critically air conflict is not without its difficulties.  Many of these difficulties do not lie with students but with the reluctance of faculty to engage in this difficult process, particularly when many faculty members do not consider conflict to be part of their teaching responsibility.  One example is a biologist who will not have a conversation about evolution, believing it to be an issue outside the domain of science.  For a school to successfully teach students how to address conflict and difference, colleagues in all disciplines must include teaching students how to voice and consider conflicts.  In the academy, there often is mistrust between disciplines about setting appropriate guidelines for admissible topics for conversation.  For example, scholars in the sciences are often wary of approaches to moral conflicts about science when taught in religious studies.  However, the sciences provide a particularly apt strategy here in which problems are the starting point for research.  Applying this model among disciplines can encourage collaborative approaches to conflicts that extend beyond a single discipline.

Where do Conflicts Come From?

Never assume that undergraduates know a great deal about traditions that are different from their own.  Moreover, many undergraduates know very little about their own traditions.  This can often lead to situations in which undergraduates are dogmatic without the information to substantiate their assertions.  Part of the task is to help undergraduates become willing to express a need to learn about their own and others’ traditions.

Students will make offensive comments for different reasons.  Some might be on the verge of letting go of a belief, perspective, or identity that has been important to them.  Conflict arises as students act out this transition publically, particularly in courses that focus on the belief, perspective or identity in question

Handling Conflict in the Classroom

Every summer at UNC there is we have a reading program for incoming students in which the University sends to them a controversial book before they enroll at the institution. Throughout the fall, students meet in small groups to talk about the book.  Concerns arose about how 18 year olds might talk about certain themes in these books.  Dr. Styers developed guidelines for how to handle such comments (refer to resources).  Preparing teachers with such guidelines can make them more comfortable should conflicts arise in the classroom.  However, no set of guidelines can work in all situations.  Context is crucially important in any conflict (e.g., certain vocabularies carry different degrees of offense depending on the setting).

Determining the range of acceptable opinions in the classroom is a critical element of preparation for addressing controversial topics.  It is ultimately the responsibility of the professor to establish these guidelines and ensure that the class adheres to them.  One successful strategy is to involve students in developing and committing to these guidelines.  Involving students in the process of determining what is appropriate in a classroom setting can help them know how to raise and respond to controversial perspectives.

What happens when certain students shut down because they perceive intolerance makes views unwelcome?  Teaching effective strategies for addressing conflict requires an environment in which students learn how to voice unpopular opinions.  It is critically important in this situation to offer students a reasonable set of guidelines for appropriate classroom discussion.  With the help of guidelines, students can learn how to articulate their opinions within an academic setting in ways that promote productive conversation.  Another successful strategy is for the professor to voice a range of opinions so that each can be thoughtfully considered.  This can provide a framework for discussion that presupposes a diverse set of student perspectives and undermine assumptions by students that the school is promoting one particular opinion.

Discussion:

Professor Styers asked the following reflection questions of session participants:

1.  Identify a situation in your own education or teaching where conflict over religion emerged in a classroom setting.
2.  How would you assess the outcome of this situation?  Was it ultimately productive or destructive to the objectives of the class?
3.  Which specific aspects of the response to the situation seemed to lead to undesirable outcomes?
4.  Which aspects of the response to this situation seemed to lead to successful outcomes?

After participants completed the exercise, questions followed.

Question: How can we use the classroom setting in ways that overcome student self-censorship? 
Comments: One strategy is to articulate perspectives that students are unwilling to voice face-to-face.  This can put the conflict on the table while not exposing students or forcing a student’s withdrawal.

Question: How do we engage conversation between students who take the Bible to be a metaphor and those who do not? 
Comments: Semester-long classes can provide the opportunity to demonstrate many different approaches to reading the Bible.  Christian history shows a rich range of approaches; taking history seriously makes a simple dogmatism difficult to maintain.  

Question: How do we address the seemingly insurmountable difference between those who believe in revealed truth and those who support evidence-based approaches? 
Comments: This is a question that points to another important difference: how do we address the radical difference between those who hold the ability to understand diverse perspectives to be a goal of education and those who don’t?  Are these differences irreconcilable?  There are some irreconcilable differences for which more dialogue accomplishes little.  That said, there is often the potential for finding more common ground than people assume is available to them.  The responsibility of the educator is to provide students with strategies for conversation that open the possibility of understanding without necessarily aiming toward agreement.

Question: What are the ethical and moral responsibilities of the academy?  Is there a way in which coming to a university demands an appreciation for different perspectives?  Even within that commitment, need we accept intolerance as a legitimate academic viewpoint? 
Comments: One strategy is to help students know their own multiple, at times conflicting, values in order to show students their own commitments.  Teaching students to be transparent about their multiple commitments can open the door for more productive intersections among students.  The premise of this strategy is that ways of looking at the world suit certain values very well but cannot address others, perhaps less-prioritized commitments.  Helping students recognize their own commitments can show them ways in which they may have some sympathy for perspectives they were originally prepared to dismiss without further discussion.  In this way, keeping the conversation going longer can show more common ground than will appear at first. We are asking people to become and celebrate being “bifocal,” able to see beyond their own limited perspective.

Recommendations:

For classroom conflict, successful strategies include

• Rather than avoid conflict, develop strategies that encourage slow, ongoing, and productive conversation; these strategies must be understood as the responsibility of teachers in all disciplines.
• Some students arrive in the classroom dogmatically committed to a religious perspective but very often those students are not fully informed about the doctrines and traditions of their religion.  An important goal of the professor should be to press students to learn more of the history and context that produced their religious traditions.
• The professor’s job is not to resolve a conflict by achieving agreement.  Instead the classroom can provide an environment in which to examine how conflict has arisen and how it has been addressed.
• Turn attention on a conflict to attention on the challenge.  Engage students in the question: How can we address such a difficult issue together?  If a course is likely to raise conflicts, you can begin the semester with a general discussion of what makes for good classroom conversation.  Professor Styers’ strategy is to start the semester with small group conversation on guidelines for productive classroom conversation.  He then proposes a plan and asks students to evaluate it.  He then revises the plan according to student suggestions and asks them to commit to it.  When conflicts arise, the class can turn to the rules they agreed on to guide the discussion.
• When someone makes a comment that may be interpreted as inappropriate by other students in the class, pause and ask everyone to take out a piece of paper and write down their feelings.  This slows down the conversation, gives the professor a moment to collect herself, and gives all the students the opportunity to express their feelings.
• After a difficult comment, the professor should speak first both to maintain control of classroom dynamics and to model appropriate scholarly conversation.
• Use the material at hand:  Turn conversation from a general argument over a given issue to one that addresses specific issues and perspectives raised in a class text.  One participant gave the example of a moment when an anti-abortion group plastered a campus with large posters of fetuses.  A religiously and politically diverse class on photography and American identity used that opportunity to look at the photographs.  Rather than ask whether abortion is murder, the class turned instead to the question of how to have a conversation about abortion.  They addressed the question: Can a photograph make an argument for an issue?  Armed with theories of photographic narrative, the students were able to have a productive conversation.
  

For Individual Campuses

• A year-long course that explores the differences among disciplinary perspectives on one topic.  Such a course demands that students accept the value of seeing from multiple disciplinary perspectives.  Such a course would require a great deal of coordination among instructors and guest lecturers.  However, if you limit the course to 3-4 disciplines, you can directly address how different disciplines ask questions, approach research, discover answers, etc.  Students can be asked to then articulate their own assumptions and commitments in a disciplinary-specific final project. 
• Increase interdisciplinary conversation about controversial issues and disciplinary differences.  This model supports the General Education approach by insisting that professorial commitments to address topics of conflict demand cross-disciplinary conversation on approaches to such topics.  This collective responsibility approach is incredibly difficult and requires a careful balance of disciplinary-specific education and interdisciplinary comparison.  It may help to have the interdisciplinary approach repeated throughout a student’s time at a university. 

References/Resources:

1. University of North Carolina Difficult Dialogues Initiative
Center for Faculty Excellence
316 Wilson Library; Campus Box 3470
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3470
(919) 966-1289 FAX (919) 962-5236
difficultdialogues@unc.edu
http://www.unc.edu/ddi/

2. Difficult Dialogues Initiative
“Promoting Pluralism and Academic Freedom on Campus.”
The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression
Attention: Difficult Dialogues Program
400 Worrell Drive
Charlottesville, Virginia 22911-8691
 http://www.difficultdialogues.org.

3. Shifting Ground: Religion and Civic Life in America
A program of the New Hampshire Humanities Council
New Hampshire Humanities Council
19 Pillsbury Street, Concord, NH 03301
(603) 224-4071 FAX (603) 224-4072
 http://www.nhhc.org/ShiftingGround.php.

Conflict and Reconciliation

1. Robert J. Nash, DeMethra LaSha Bradley, & Arthur W. Chickering, How to Talk about Hot Topics on Campus: From Polarization to Moral Conversation (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 2008)
2. Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (New York: Random House, 2006).
3. W. Barnett Pearce & Stephen W. Littlejohn, Moral Conflicts: When Social Worlds Collide (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1997).
4. John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997).
5. Gerzon, M. (2006). Moving Beyond Debate: Start a Dialogue. Retrieved Sep. 10, 2007, from Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA. Web site: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5351.html.

The Difficult Dialogues Initiative

1. O'Neil, R. M. (2006). "The Difficult Dialogues Initiative." Academe 92(4): 29-30. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2006/JA/feat/onei.htm.
2. Welch Wegner, J. (2006). "The View from Chapel Hill." Academe 92(4): 46-49. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2006/JA/feat/Wegn.htm.

Teaching Resources

Research on Academic Freedom & Religious Pluralism

1. Bellah, R. N. (1967). Civil Religion in America. Retrieved Sep. 10, 2007, from http://www.robertbellah.com. Web site: http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm.
2. Connor, W. R. (2006, June 29) The right time and place for big questions. Chronicle of Higher Education, B8. Retrieval September, 2007, from: http://chronicle.com.
3. Gilley, D. (2005). Whose spirituality? Cautionary notes about the role of spirituality in higher education. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 104, 93-99. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/112168178/PDFSTART.
4. Gomez, M. N. (2006). Inquiry, Respect, and Dissent. Academe, 92(4), 55-57. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2006/JA/feat/gome.htm.
5. Jaschik, S. (2005, April 14) God and Freshmen. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieval September, 2007, from: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/04/14/spirit.
6. Jakobsen, J. R. (2006). Campus Religious Conflict Should Go Public. Academe, 92(4), 35-40. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2006/JA/feat/Jako.htm.
7. Kaplan, M. L. (2006). Getting Religion in the Public Research University. Academe, 92(4), 41-45. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2006/JA/feat/Kapl.htm.
8. LaFrance, J. & Abu Shakrah, J. (2006). Acting Against Oppression. Academe, 92(4), 50-53. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2006/JA/feat/LaFr.htm.
9. López-Riverz, M. (2006, June 9) Course Explores Using Mathematical Models to Prove or Disprove God's Existence. Chronicle of Higher Education, B6. Retrieval September, 2007, from: http://chronicle.com.
10. Poe, H. L. (2005). Issues related to spirituality and the search for truth in sectarian institutions of higher education. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 104, 59-66. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/112168176/PDFSTART.
11. Public Agenda. (2005). Religion and Public Life, 2000-2004: Survey Shows Religious Americans Less Likely to Support Compromise. Retrieved Sep. 10, 2007, from Public Agenda. Web site: http://www.publicagenda.org/research/research_reports_details.cfm?list=1
12. Renwick Monroe, K. (2006). Can Empathy Be Taught? Academe, 92(4), 58-63. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2006/JA/feat/Monr.htm.
13. Sommerville, J. C. (2006, June 6) Exhaustion of secularism. Chronicle of Higher Education, B6. Retrieval September, 2007, from: http://chronicle.com.
14. Winston, J. (2006). Difficult Silences. Academe, 92(4), 64-67. Retrieved September 10, 2007 from: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2006/JA/feat/Wins.htm.

Discussion Guides

1. Welch Wenger, J. (2006). Difficult Dialogues Initiative Discussion Guide: Promoting Pluralism and Academic Freedom on Campus. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC-Chapel Hill.
2. Dispute Settlement Center of Orange County (2006). Developing the
Capacity to Conduct Difficult Dialogues on UNC-Chapel Hill Campus. Carrboro, NC.