Vision
To build trust, relationships, and healthy conversation skills so JMU students can better dialogue across political and cultural divides on difficult issues.
Purpose
With the 2024 election just around the corner, and our nation and campuses feeling more polarized, it is vital that students understand how to have productive conversations about difficult issues, especially when the person they are talking with has a different view of the world.
Universities across the country are facing pressure to ensure “viewpoint diversity” while also encouraging students to dialogue across divides. These are noble goals that often leave students wondering how actually having a civil conversation across divides works. When students turn on the TV or in their social media feeds, the political discourse they see often looks like screaming matches, insult factories, or is full of misinformation. JMU students are left wondering what productive disagreement is and how they can meaningfully talk with others, especially when designed to do so in class.
Being able to have a conversation with people who are different is a vital twenty-first century civic, workplace, and life skill. The ability to hear contrary views, to disagree with those views, and even to offer contrary views is critical to a functioning democracy. Students learning to listen to different views and to productively offer their own and navigate toward common ground is a skill critical for democratic citizenship. Madison’s own legacy is about learning from others, fostering collaboration, embracing complexity of issues and pragmatic solutions while advancing the common good.
With We Are Madison’s Legacy, we attempt to create an intimate space where pairs of students can have real conversations about difficult issues. Like Madison, JMU students are also paradoxes, holding incongruent views, or views that are seen by others as problematic, difficult to understand, or antithetical to the values held by others. And yet, we each bring something unique and important to each conversation we have. It is in those differences that learning about issues and about how to navigate others’ views happens.
We hope to field many conversations that can be shared with faculty, staff, and students as exemplars of difficult, yet productive talk. These recordings can serve as real, unscripted examples for faculty to refer to before assigning difficult conversations in their classes, as they can serve as role models and high quality examples of what classroom dialogue ideally can look like.
Implementation
Students will apply to be a part of the WAML conversation by filling out an interest form. The form asks background questions: size of hometown, size of high school, year in school, and trust. The interest form also asks students to write a quick 100-word biography and a second 100-word statement about why the issue matters to them. They can choose from one of the Initial topics including mental health, guns and safety, the value of higher education, free speech. Students can also choose whether their conversation is video recorded, audio recorded, or anonymous transcript only.
Once students are selected for a conversation, the WAML team pairs the students with similar availability and topic interest, but different in other ways as determined by their personal statement or background metrics (size of hometown, location, etc). Students are then notified about their acceptance and the day, time and location of their conversation. They are also given a prep sheet that outlines the structure of the conversation and what to expect.
The conversations are meant to be about 30-45 minutes in length and are lightly facilitated by a JMU student. Students begin the conversation by reading each other’s bios and are asked to share something that they left out of their bios. Then students begin discussing the issue by asking questions of each other. Students will then share their histories and experiences with the issue, then dig into their differences, before coming together to (hopefully) find some common ground.
About your privacy and safety:
Your privacy and safety matter to us. The data you submit to JMU Qualtrics for the purposes of matching is only shared with the Madison’s Legacy team (it is password protected and requires a @jmu.edu email). The exception is your short biography which we state will be shared with your partner. Recordings are stored on a password protected computer which is only accessed by Madison Center for Civic Engagement staff for the purposes of audio/video editing.
Prior to us publishing your conversation, we will give you an opportunity to review and approve what we post to the website (https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/waml). We want to ensure we are not posting any part of the conversation that you wish to be kept private and we will not post any audio/video with significant personally identifying information. We tend to use pseudonyms (so, we use your middle name or nickname instead of your first name) to protect your privacy. We want to ensure you are comfortable in the conversation.
This project has a pending IRB protocol.