by Sara Ring
Quick Summary
Facing a divided nation, the American Library Association (ALA) Public Programs Office and the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) are offering a free learning series to explore various dialogue facilitation approaches to position libraries to foster conversation and lead change in their communities. I'm currently attending the three-part academic libraries series, and what follows is a summary from the first webinar, Libraries Transforming Communities: Introduction to Dialogue & Deliberation.
Facing a divided nation, the American Library Association (ALA) Public Programs Office and the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) are offering a free learning series to explore various dialogue facilitation approaches to position libraries to foster conversation and lead change in their communities. The two-year project is called Libraries Transforming Communities: Models for Change. The series for large and/or urban public libraries was offered in Spring 2017, and I'm now attending the Fall 2017 academic libraries series. Below is a short summary of the first webinar in the three-part webinar series.
The Libraries Transforming Communities: Introduction to Dialogue & Deliberation webinar featured Courtney Breese (National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation) and Nancy Kranich (Rutgers University). The presenters introduced the concept of engagement and discussed examples in higher education. Nancy Kranich sees the following roles that academic libraries can play: offering a civic space, civic literacy in addition to information literacy, civic forum conveners, and as partners in service learning.
We were asked "what is an issue or topic that needs to be discussed at your institution?" The list was too long to include everything, but some of them included topics such as white supremacy, DACA, Title IX, race, boundaries of free speech, how to engage (or not) with trolls, and buildings named after confederate leaders. This led us to discussion of two modes of discourse: dialogue and deliberation. With dialogue, the goal is to seek greater understanding of a topic or issue and to build trust (decisions are not necessarily made).
With deliberation, which usually comes after dialogue, the goal is to find areas of common ground and to push a group to make a decision. Deliberation is useful to employ when there is no easy answer to a problem (e.g. climate change). The goals of both modes are to move individuals from thinking only of "I" to "them" to eventually, "we." What do "we" care about. View this really nice visual of the goals of dialogue and deliberation: http://ncdd.org/rc/item/3636
For dialogue or deliberation to be a success, choose a timely topic but make sure to get input from your community first on what they would like to discuss. Next, lay out some ground rules such as, the moderator will guide the discussion but remain neutral, and emphasize that the dialogue or deliberation is not a debate. Then, choose an "engagement stream" for the discussion. Is the intent for exploration, for conflict transformation, for decision-making, or to take a collaborative action? View this handy guide to learn more about engagement streams.
