This July, five undergraduate student leaders and a few staff members from the University of Washington boarded a plane to London, England. Their shared mission was to observe and research public and civil debates and to bring those lessons back to Seattle to design and implement civil discourse activities at the UW over the next three-to-five years.
This project, known as the Civil Discourse Project, is an innovative collaboration between the Brotherhood Initiative (BI) and the Sisterhood Initiative (SI) at the UW. It was conceived to provide a transformative learning experience for students of color and to contribute to larger efforts at the UW to foster civil dialogue. The purpose of the project is to develop a framework about civil discourse – one that includes emotional regulation, compassion, kindness, respectful disagreement and the prevention of physical and verbal attacks. That framework can then be adopted and/or adapted by research and practitioner communities for their own context.
“The Civil Discourse Project is an opportunity for students to identify nuance within their own communities and to challenge some of their generalizations around how civil discourse looks and how it should happen. It’s an opportunity to disrupt their thinking.” – Dr. Kandi Bauman, Assistant Director of Research and Curriculum, UW Brotherhood Initiative