Small Group Meeting and Questions for Follow-up

Hi Everyone,

Ellen, Theresa, Molly and I met yesterday to begin discussing our small group's plan for the dialogues. In that meeting, we decided to post the notes on the blog in the hope that they would be of interest to others, spur conversation, and that Leda would respond to some of our questions. So, here is a summary of our conversation with specific questions at the end.
Thanks
Liz

Process and Content Goals
Our conversation began with a discussion of what our process and content goals might be. This quickly brought us to the question of whether each group with have their own goals or we will have goals that are the same as the overall project goals. Ellen mentioned that she worked on some goals for a grant that will used in dialoguing with social workers for CEUs. Perhaps these goals may be the same overall goals for the dialogue project on-campus as well? The goals are:

1. To practice listening, speaking and asking questions with the purpose of developing shared understanding;

2. To explore personal racial and ethnic identities and how they impact experiences in the workplace [for campus groups substitute "on campus" or "in our lives" for "in the workplace"?};

3. To demonstrate effective use of invitational communication as a means of ethical engagement with the subject matter, audience, and occasion.

We decided to postpone our goal setting until we knew whether or not the entire group would have overall goals.

Icebreakers
Next we discussed the use of introductions and icebreakers in the dialogue groups and talked about ones that we've used in the past including:

1. Name and a story about your name
2. Name and something about you that you can't tell by looking at me (this one we spent considerable time talking about and expanded to alternatives).
3. Alternatives for #2 included: Name and "you can't tell by looking at me, but I can ..."; Name and "you can't tell by looking at me, but I don't ..."; Name and "you can't tell by looking at me, but I want ..." etc.**

**In doing the second icebreaker and its alternatives, we thought a transition could be then made into assumptions people have made about you or we make about others.

4. Name and something you took away or stood out for you from the first dialogue group (we thought this would be away to reconnect especially with different people in the groups).

Visual, Media, Text Aids
We spent some time talking about the use of a video clip or document or text (such as Peggy McIntosh's Backpack) within the context of the group. Positives to starting with some clip or piece for us included a common group for the group to start discussing their personal stories from, a way to validate people's experiences as more than one individual experience, and a means to expand the conversation to institutional racism and issues of race in a bigger picture.

A suggestion out of this was to perhaps have an e-reserve for participants that have other resources or information if they want to know more, read more, etc. after the dialogues.

Ending, Concluding
Finally, we talked about questions that would help wrap up the conversation including: "what are you taking away from this conversation" and "what is one thing you want to think more about" as both a means of reflecting and concluding but also trying to prompt or encourage actions after or outside of the dialogue.

Summary/Questions
That was the gist of our conversation. Hopefully the group will add/edit as they see fit. To summarize though, the questions we had for Leda and others are:

1. Can we start an e-reserve for students wanting to know more?
2. Will there be process and content goals for the overall project and what will they be?
3. Should our content/process goals then be the same as or reflect these?
4. Plans for orientation:
Are students going to get an introduction to the differences between dialogue and discussion?
Are students going to get an introduction to ground rules and guidelines for the dialogue?
Are students going to be introduced to the goals of the overall project?
And finally, how many students are we planning to have in each session?