UConn Goes All In with Dialogue

The seeds for the University of Connecticut’s commitment to dialogue were planted nearly a decade ago. In 2016, the university held “A Dialogue on Dialogues,” which reflected a collective desire to understand and incorporate dialogue at UConn. Essential Partners (EP) was one of the external organizations invited to join.

Since that time, UConn and EP have enjoyed a strong reciprocal relationship. After two UConn faculty members won a multi-million dollar humanities grant from the John Templeton Foundation to explore Humility and Conviction in Public Life, EP became a subawardee. The goal of EP’s project was to allow EP to adapt its Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD) approach for higher education classrooms—and bring those learnings back to UConn.

The ultimate result of that initial commitment was UConn’s “Democracy and Dialogues Initiative (DDI),” part of the university’s Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute (HRI). DDI infuses the university’s work with EP tools on campus, in the community, and, importantly, in the classroom.

Democracy and Dialogues: RSD Training for All

DDI is co-directed by Brendan Kane, Professor of History and Professor of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and Nana Amos, who serves as director of Community Outreach and Engagement for Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs of HRI. DDI’s co-leadership model helps bridge between dialogue in co-curricular campus activities and in the community and dialogue in the classroom.

DDI has a strong service component, running dialogues not just on the university campus but also in the surrounding community. But DDI goes one crucial step further: It trains others to run their own dialogues as well. Effective facilitation is essential to the successful use of RSD, and the Initiative provides trained facilitators for dialogues on and off campus. Training more people in how to facilitate RSD means that the university and the community have more capacity to hold difficult, necessary conversations.

DDI trains stakeholders in several different methods, including their own Encounters model, but have a particular respect for the flexibility and impact of RSD. To date, DDI has trained more than 1,000 individuals in RSD—faculty, staff, students, members of the public, and even students at E. O. Smith High School (where UConn students train “near peers” at the high school).

On campus, RSD has been included in faculty workshops on dialogue in the classroom and in partnerships with the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), used to support residence hall advisors and on-campus faith communities, and incorporated into student trainings in a variety of disciplines. Off campus, DDI trainings are often open to local community members, helping to foster a broader culture of dialogue, intellectual humility, and open discourse.

Dialogue in Co-Curricular Events

Members of the university community have also participated in a variety of DDI-hosted, issue-focused dialogues, open to anyone on campus. Many of these dialogues are developed, organized, and facilitated by DDI’s Student Fellows, who are compensated financially or with academic credit. Topics addressed include mental health, voting, censorship in education, and checks and balances in the government.

In the 2024-2025 academic year alone, 57 dialogic programs were held in collaboration with a broad array of partners. Eleven undergraduate students were also mentored and trained to plan and execute peer dialogues.

Ancy Trinita Leo, a 2025 graduate of the Allied Health Sciences undergraduate program, reflects on her two-year experience as a Student Fellow. Noting recent issues that have come up nationally and internationally, she says, “The Student Fellows noticed there wasn’t a space for students to come together to talk about this in a structured format. There have been some protests on campus and some other endeavors, but there hasn’t been a space where people can come together and discuss these topics without it being a debate or without it being there’s a right or wrong. So the Student Fellows all work together to formulate a way that we can talk about these topics that would be beneficial for our UConn community as well as our outside community in Connecticut.”

Dialogue Encounters in the Community

In the surrounding community and throughout Connecticut, DDI offers a range of “Encounters,” a model for structured conversation that blends dialogue with content expertise. Community partners include the Hartford Public Library, Connecticut’s Old State House and the Connecticut Democracy Center, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Amistad Center for Art and Culture, the Akomawt Educational Initiative, and HartBeat Ensemble.

According to Kane, “We say to our partners, ‘What do you have going? And what would you like a dialogue about?’ And then we put the dialogue together in collaboration with them. We take the lead, and we provide the people to come do them: moderators and facilitators.”

DDI’s graduate assistant Saah Agyemang-Badu, a student in the Master’s in Social Work program, facilitates RSD-based dialogues throughout the community. “It was a steep learning curve for me,” she says as she remembers the first time she helped plan and facilitate Encounters—a community dialogue on a sensitive topic. DDI was working with a community partner to host a dialogue on intimate partner violence, and Agyemang-Badu, who had just begun working with DDI, was worried that RSD wouldn’t work for such a fraught issue.

She knew in theory that RSD would allow them to put the issue in a “container” and that people would be able to “freely discuss their experiences if they are feeling safe.” But she recalls, “I didn’t understand how that was going to work or how that was going to look. I felt it was too sensitive for a conversation like that to happen.”

At the pre-dialogue planning session, Agyemang-Badu thought, “This is too touchy. I don’t think people will open up to have this conversation.”

“I was a skeptic,” she says. The dialogues she had participated in up to this time had been on democracy, a topic she felt was “not that sensitive.” At the dialogue, which had 25 to 30 attendees, she facilitated one of the tables. The participants at her table—from UConn students to a senior community member—shared their experiences authentically and deeply.

“My mind was blown at the level of vulnerability at my table,” she recalls. “It was such a beautiful experience for me. After that particular dialogue, I became a believer.”

Dialogue in the Classroom

Like Agyemang-Badu, Noga Shemer recalls her first use of RSD. “When I started bringing the RSD model into the classroom, it changed everything, and I had this overwhelming sense of what the classroom could be,” she says. “The student feedback was unlike anything I had seen before. Students said, ‘Wow, why haven’t we had the chance to do this before? And why don’t we get to do this more often in our education?’”

An Associate Professor in Residence in the Department of Anthropology and a faculty affiliate in DDI and CETL, Shemer says that RSD helps her not only facilitate challenging conversations: It also helps her “create an inclusive classroom beyond anything I have been able to do before because everyone is participating and everyone is being heard.” This “radical shift in the classroom dynamics,” she says, makes it possible for “students to talk about things in an open way and share their experiences and viewpoints without some of the typical conversation patterns erupting.”

“I realized,” Shemer concludes, “that this was something I should be doing in all my courses proactively, way before we got to the class that was about the hard subject.” She finds that RSD works “even in a really large lecture hall,” making it feasible for an introductory-level general education course.

Dialogue as a Graduation Competency

In 2020, toward the end of the first Donald Trump administration and the election of Joe Biden, UConn’s president convened a university committee to look at civil discourse and dialogue, chaired by Professor Kane.

The committee’s most important recommendation was to add dialogue as a graduation competency. Its members felt, says Kane, that dialogue should be critical at a “taxpayer-funded, land-grant institution that has written for itself a charge to prepare people for local, national, and global citizenship and to serve as an ongoing model for that kind of movement throughout the world.”

With UConn’s growing interest in and commitment to dialogue, DDI and CETL began offering faculty trainings and workshops informed by EP tools and sometimes facilitated by EP staff and consultants. This helped faculty gain a better understanding of RSD, how it can be used and incorporated, and how it differs from other forms of dialogue and from communication as a field.

While all of this was happening, UConn was in the process of updating its general education program. The new Common Curriculum, which launched in August 2025, includes a dialogue graduation competency. All undergraduate students will have experience with dialogue as part of their graduation requirements through the Common Curriculum.

UConn is the first public R1 institution to create a dialogue graduation competency. Approving this change was a major accomplishment and required both extensive and intensive work across the huge institution. “Hundreds of people worked to make it happen,” says Pamela Bedore, Professor of English and chair of the Common Curriculum Committee (CCC) from 2022 to 2025.

Implementing the change will require even more work, but Bedore says, “There’s a really big level of energy for the new curriculum.” Junior faculty are especially excited about the focus on dialogue, and they are “going to do wonderful, new, innovative things in the classroom,” says Shemer.

UConn is committed to integrating dialogue into every Common Curriculum course. Jamie Kleinman, Associate Professor in Residence in the Department of Psychological Science, is the incoming chair of the Common Curriculum Committee. She says, “I want every STEM class to have a dialogue. Imagine if the students had more practice doing this in more of their classes. It really speaks to the nature of approaching this from a systems perspective and how big a need there is for that.”

At UConn, the Future Is Now

From DDI and CETL to the Common Curriculum Committee, Reflective Structured Dialogue is having an impact on students, faculty, staff, and community members.

Of special importance are junior faculty, who represent the future of the university. Anna-Michelle McSorley, an assistant professor in the Department of Allied Health Sciences, joined UConn in 2024. As a professor specializing in health equity, she works with a variety of students, some of whom will go into public health, others who will directly provide medical services. She sees a strong link between dialogue, democracy, and health.

“Healthy democracy, healthy people,” McSorley says. “The huge space where we engage in the practice of what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be civically engaged, what it means to have dialogues through difference—that is the role higher ed is meant to play. We need the community to see us as the place that they can come to practice and learn that.”

Also key to the future is the university’s students. What can they learn from RSD, and what can they take into their lives post-college to work for a better world?

“Many of our students crave this kind of education, and they don’t even realize that they’re craving it,” Shemer reflects. “But when it happens, it is a life-changing experience. I look at my classroom, where we talk about every politically sensitive topic there is, and the students are learning from each other. They are changing their own minds, each other’s minds. They are in it together. They crave mediated, facilitated spaces that are not social media.”

“Students come to university so they can think deeply about issues that matter,” Shemer concludes. “They are the future, and the stakes are high. They want spaces where they can think these things through.”