An Instructor's Toolkit for Inquiry, Dialogue, and Discourse Across Differences
The ability to dialogue and have constructive discourse across differences is a critical skill for our students, and it’s top-of-mind in higher education in this moment. I like this step-by-step, well-researched toolkit for a number of reasons, but especially because the authors incorporate teaching scholarship around belonging, equity, and inclusion into their approach to teaching the skills (and value) of dialogue across differences in viewpoints and deep inquiry into one's beliefs and assumptions.
The Inquiry and Dialogue Toolkit and the resources curated here offer research and guidance on the importance of academic expression, deep inquiry, and dialogue as well as how to operationalize these values in effective ways. This requires attention to relationships—between students and faculty, between students and students, and between students and academic material. In order to make this compendium as practical as possible, we have divided the toolkit into the five key stages we consider to be central to the process of navigating productive academic inquiry and dialogue:
- Preparing yourself, as the instructor
- Preparing your students: Cultivating the environment
- Preparing your students: Cultivating skills
- In class: How to facilitate, design, and navigate productive dialogue and inquiry when it’s a planned part of the course, and when it occurs unexpectedly
- Reflection and iterative growth