An unlikely partnership between an Indiana community college and a national nonprofit is helping students learn how to solve problems and have productive dialogue alongside people they disagree with.
Lauren—Thank you for the positive comment and mention of my course at Ivy Tech. It is good to see, as you describe, the variety of ways to approach the problem of polarity. I was particularly struck by your comments about Storycorps. For a long time, one of my duties was to oversee the university's international center—a recreational and gathering place for international students. Multicultural education was a hot top for my colleagues, and they often disagreed with my take on the matter. The coach of the center's intramural soccer team complained to me one day that he couldn't coach because most of the students were just learning English. I told him to teach them what "Man on" means and then let them do the rest. The team worked great together. We had a string quartet made up of students with four different languages and homes on four different continents. They played beautifully together. I have always felt strongly that the best way to address multicultural issues was to put mixed groups together to complete a task—as long as that task did not include discussing multicultural issues. That may apply to polarizing issues as well.
Lauren—Thank you for the positive comment and mention of my course at Ivy Tech. It is good to see, as you describe, the variety of ways to approach the problem of polarity. I was particularly struck by your comments about Storycorps. For a long time, one of my duties was to oversee the university's international center—a recreational and gathering place for international students. Multicultural education was a hot top for my colleagues, and they often disagreed with my take on the matter. The coach of the center's intramural soccer team complained to me one day that he couldn't coach because most of the students were just learning English. I told him to teach them what "Man on" means and then let them do the rest. The team worked great together. We had a string quartet made up of students with four different languages and homes on four different continents. They played beautifully together. I have always felt strongly that the best way to address multicultural issues was to put mixed groups together to complete a task—as long as that task did not include discussing multicultural issues. That may apply to polarizing issues as well.
Loved the ideas here. Wrote about it and linked to it on my substack: https://laurenbrownoned.substack.com/p/across-the-big-divide-thoughts-on