Lewis & Clark: Dialogue is Who We Are

Visit Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregon, and you’ll hear faculty, students, staff, and administrators talking with each other in ways you might not hear on all college and university campuses. That’s because Lewis & Clark is so committed to the practice of dialogue that it’s central to the institution’s strategic imperatives. “This is who we are. This is part of being at Lewis & Clark,” says Janet Bixby, the school’s first director of “Community Dialogues.” 

Community Dialogues is President Robin Holmes-Sullivan’s signature initiative. “The ultimate goal of this initiative,” President Holmes-Sullivan says, “is for our community to learn and practice dialogue in both formal and informal settings to build our capacity to listen, speak, and learn with each other about topics central to our collective well-being, even when those topics are contentious.” 

Lewis & Clark describes itself as “a private institution with a public conscience.” It includes an undergraduate College of Arts and Sciences, a Graduate School of Education and Counseling, and a School of Law. In just over two years of working with Essential Partners, Lewis & Clark has trained 32 faculty members, 12 staff members, and 48 students to facilitate dialogue using EP’s trademark Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD) approach. 

The results of this institutional commitment are tangible: a series of dialogues about Lewis & Clark’s mascot; a groundbreaking course on Palestine and Israel, built on a foundation of dialogic practice; a deepened campus/community environmental studies symposium; a reflective art therapy project; and the integration of RSD throughout myriad aspects of Student Life. 

There are also crucial intangible outcomes, such as students who are prepared to bring dialogic skills into their civic and professional lives. Jia Ng, a student who is a trained Community Dialogues facilitator, says, “Personally, Community Dialogues has benefited me a lot. I really grew as a communicator. It’s really helped me improve my public speaking skills and in professional settings. I’m able to converse with neutrality. I can transparently say what I mean.”

Joining Forces: Essential Partners and Community Dialogues

Liberal arts colleges across the country share a tradition of promoting many kinds of dialogue—academic discussions, explorations, and debates. “But in a time of increasing polarization, both in society at large and in higher education right now, it can be very challenging to foster open dialogue in the classroom,” says Bixby, who also served as an associate professor of education and as associate dean of the graduate school of education and counseling. 

“Recognizing the problematic dynamics of so much of our public discourse is really powerful—and then having strategies to intervene and prevent that and to promote other kinds of more thoughtful, engaging dialogue is powerful,” Bixby says. 

“Essential Partners has the magic sauce—its trainings,” Bixby adds. “Working with Essential Partners and Community Dialogues has enabled us to say, ‘Hey, we have tools to help us be able to do this, and we have ways to do this. We can address these things.’ That's been incredibly useful and powerful.”

Revisiting the Mascot

Among Lewis & Clark’s early uses of Essential Partners tools was a series of dialogues focused on Lewis & Clark’s mascot, the Pioneers. Many people in the Lewis & Clark community felt it was time for a change, while many others did not see the need for such a change. 

Typically, a college might host an open forum to give people a chance to voice their opinions. But with Essential Partners training in its tool belt, the campus decided to host multiple virtual dialogues about the mascot. Alumni from around the country and across the decades along with students, faculty, and staff were able to join facilitated conversations. “They were very open, thoughtful, inquisitive conversations,” Bixby recalls.

Reflecting on this and other contentious topics, Bixby notes, “It’s not uncommon to feel a certain amount of trepidation about controversial issues or big decisions that have to be made where you want community input. You don’t want there to be a lot of antagonism or unnecessary conflict about a major decision or discussion of a particular topic. It’s really powerful to have this set of tools, to say, ‘yeah, we can do that.’”

Understanding Palestine and Israel

As at many campuses, the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel brought what Bixby calls “tremendous grief and concern” to Lewis & Clark. She says, “We wanted to create a space where people from different perspectives could speak and listen to each other.”

In collaboration with the Community Dialogues office, Oren Kosansky, associate professor of anthropology and director of Middle East and North African Studies, coordinated a campus-wide teach-in. It was attended by about 200 community members. “It wasn’t a dialogue per se,” he recalls, “but we wanted to figure out how to create a teach-in where we knew people would be coming with a variety of different passions and perspectives. We thought about what container we could create to make this go as well as possible.” 

But “one teach-in doesn’t change things,” Kosansky says. “It moves the needle a little bit. If you don’t follow it up, then it’s really hard to sustain it. We are not best served in a one-off dialogue. People had to commit to doing a series of dialogues.” 

So he and his colleagues proposed a one-credit, dialogue-based course on Palestine and Israel. 

Twenty-five undergraduate students enrolled in the course, and numerous faculty members were involved as speakers and discussion leaders. In addition, two undergraduate students who had been trained in RSD were involved as dialogue facilitators. 

The course featured three components that were interspersed throughout the term:

• a set of three Reflective Structured Dialogues, utilizing the full Essential Partners model;
• a set of three text-based discussion sessions that were a hybrid of dialogue and analysis, with faculty members serving as guides to understanding the texts; and
• two teach-ins, each of which drew about 100 people from across campus, with faculty speaking on topics and follow-up discussion facilitated by faculty and students who had been trained in the Essential Partners tools. 

The teach-ins, says Bixby, were especially powerful. The trained faculty facilitator kicked off the discussion portion by reminding attendees—comprising faculty, staff, and students at all levels—that questions of genuine curiosity were welcome in this learning forum. “People really did that beautifully,” Bixby says. “They asked really thoughtful questions, challenging questions, difficult questions.” 

Both Kosansky and Bixby are proud of the work the faculty and Community Dialogues did together on this course. 

Kosansky reflects on the impact the course had on students. “There was definitely a sense of gratitude for just creating the space,” he says. “So many students were so personally and emotionally wrought by the situation but felt that there was no space and that talking about it elsewhere was too risky. Students definitely appreciated just the fact that faculty and staff were committed to doing the work.” 

Bixby concurs. “We actually addressed head-on this terrible, historical tragedy and ongoing humanitarian crisis,” she says. “We’re an institution of higher education. We should be discussing this in all kinds of ways, and so to be able to do that and know that we could do it in thoughtful, academic ways was really powerful.” 

Deepening Student Life

Ben Meoz, vice president for Student Life and dean of students, finds applications for the Essential Partners RSD framework just about everywhere in Student Life. 

Although Meoz is deeply experienced in team-building and facilitation techniques, the EP framework’s structure is unlike anything he has experienced before. “I am really excited about how it continues to expand the different ways that we can build community and culture on campus,” he says. 

As Lewis & Clark moved to make RSD an integral part of the entire institution, administrators began to realize how important it is to introduce incoming first-year students to the practice. 

To do that, RSD has been added to existing orientation activities “by bringing in the sort of prompts we would use in a Reflective Structured Dialogue but without the same risk levels,” Meoz says. “I keep it a little bit lighter but really try to lean into furthering understanding and that genuine curiosity piece.” Prompts include questions about joining a new community, being a part of a community, and identifying the things that help you feel connected.

Another place where Student Life embeds “micro-practices” learned from Essential Partners is in “roommate interviews.” Most campuses have students create “roommate agreements.” Meoz explains that these are typically nonbinding, noncontractual documents that nevertheless feel very formal. “The roommate agreement is a written document between roommates about how they’re going to divvy up the space or the time,” he says. “It’s very transactional.” 

At Lewis & Clark, this potentially controversial, high-stakes transaction has been reimagined as a “roommate interview.” Students walk through their preferences and needs. By using dialogic micro-practices, they get beneath the surface of those preferences and needs and say, “Why is that important to you when that isn’t happening?” 

A similar practice is used with entire floors in a residence hall as well as the larger community. Meoz says, “We want to cultivate genuine curiosity among students so that they really open themselves to the needs of others and also feel like others have an awareness of what their needs and experiences are.” 

Meoz reports that dialogic micro-practices have also become infused throughout Student Life. Full-time professional staff meetings practice the principle of “connect before content,” and student organizations use RSD when they form anew each year and when they face difficult conversations. 

From the Classroom to Students’ Future Professions

RSD provides a powerful set of tools to foster dialogue about challenging issues, but at Lewis & Clark, these tools also find their way into students’ own future professional development. They learn these tools experientially, during facilitated dialogues and dialogic classrooms, as well as training on how to use the tools on campus and even how to use them in professional settings.

The ENVX Symposium, hosted by the Environmental Studies department, has a long tradition of bringing together people on all sides of contentious environmental issues—students, faculty, and community members. Bixby says, “This program has always been deeply committed to ensuring that all of our Environmental Studies students know how to be in conversation with people who don’t necessarily agree with them.” 

In spring 2025, multistakeholder groups studied issues such as farm animal protection, fire use and prevention, and workers’ rights. The symposium, which will be held during the fall 2025 semester, will bring these working groups together “to try and hammer out some sort of common understanding.” 

With the addition of RSD to the ENVX tool kit, says Bixby, the facilitators “model how to bring people together who don’t necessarily think the same to listen to each other, to ask each other questions, to do research together, and then to see where they might find points of agreement.” Bixby concludes, “They're not going to solve the problem, but they are hopefully going to be able to talk across differences and come to some shared understandings of some things.” 

Students in the Master’s in Art Therapy program are gaining similar skills. Mary Andrus, assistant professor and art therapy program co-director, wanted to have her art therapy students learn how to promote dialogue around art related to important social issues and how these issues impact community members. They engaged in dialogue prompted by an art project called the “Vision Quilt,” which illustrated community members’ experiences of gun violence.

The resulting RSD, says Bixby, “was a great way for these art therapy students in training to see how this can be done so that they can take that out into their professional lives.”

Understanding Dialogue as Action

Lewis & Clark students are practicing dialogic skills. They’re using them across campus—when they’re in the classroom, when they’re participating in co-curricular events, even when they’re getting to know their roommate. They’re using these skills not just with fellow students and with faculty and administrators but also with community members who have different views. 

Some elements of campus life get left behind when students launch. But when L&C students graduate, they carry the skills of RSD into their professional lives and civic engagement. They become leaders who are able to interrupt the dynamics of polarization and build connections across deep differences of identities and perspectives.

Annissa Rhynders, a graduate student in Higher Education Student Affairs, underscores the deeper impact and importance of Reflective Structured Dialogue. “Talking about things is difficult and also super important,” she says. “Talking is doing something. I am beginning to see dialogue as an action and as a tool.”