Photo by Andrew Shurtleff

At a workshop on Sustained Dialogue on April 10, U.Va. alumna Samar Katnani (in blue), founder of a U.Va. Jewish-Arab Sustained Dialogue group last year, and current leader Ilan Gutherz (in brown) led a discussion with students from around the country who attended the national conference on Grounds last weekend.

April 15, 2005

By Anne Bromley

“It’s not just talk, it’s a social movement.”

The slogan of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network gives new meaning to “walking the talk.” The University hosted the program’s second annual national conference in Charlottesville on April 9 and 10, with about 115 students and several administrators from around the country attending. The conference provided ample food for talk — with specific goals in mind.

Sustained Dialogue combines talking about issues of misunderstanding and conflict, such as race relations, with finding solutions and putting them into practice. At the conference, the students met to gain resources and strengthen skills they can use in the Sustained Dialogue programs on their campuses and to train new moderators who are interested in starting groups. Alumni and current moderators led many of the sessions.

When Harold Saunders, the president of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue, addressed the crowd from the newly formed Campus Network, he said that last year it was called a “project,” and this year, the growing branches of Sustained Dialogue are forming a network of schools and people actively pursuing and engaging in the process.

The institute, founded by Saunders, a former diplomat, is an independent, not-for-profit organization seeking to promote the Sustained Dialogue process for transforming racial, ethnic and other deep-rooted conflicts in the United States and abroad.

The University was the second to organize Sustained Dialogue, when then-second-year students Priya Parker and Jackie Switzer, in 2001, brought together a curious and dedicated band of about 40 students who wanted to see if it would improve the cultural climate for enhancing diversity on Grounds.

“The essence of Sustained Dialogue is aiming to improve underlying human relationships … and to transform that change into social action,” Parker said. An important part of the conference was having participants from different schools meet in a new mix of groups to hold their own sustained dialogues, she said.

With many being experienced at the process, they could find a deep level of understanding and a new realization: that they are not alone but part of something larger than themselves, Saunders said in his opening remarks.

“For me, the conference was a confidence builder,” said Daniel Rubin, a third-year U.Va. student who helped with and participated in the conference. “We work so hard at U.Va. for racial progress, to see 17 other schools doing the same makes me feel part of a larger process. From Colorado to Ohio to New Jersey, SD is changing minds. It's a special time to be at college and in Sustained Dialogue.”

At one of the sessions, fourth-year U.Va. students Carlton Wilson and Leslie Atchley led a workshop on ways to strengthen groups, a meeting that swelled to 32 participants. They discussed why members keep coming to Sustained Dialogue groups and why some people stop.

They come because the group provides a safe space to talk about personal experiences, attitudes or perspectives they wouldn’t explore elsewhere, where they can agree and disagree, and they come because it’s a break from the daily academic grind and a place to meet new friends.

“What keeps people coming are relationships that can turn into friendships — there are different ways of cultivating friends,” said Wilson, the editor of U.Va. SD’s publication, Stereo::Type. He has been dedicated to SD for three years, and now moderates two groups. Each group consists of 12 to 14 students of various backgrounds and ethnicities, who meet regularly to work out issues related to racial tensions and other differences, who continue their dialogue to a satisfactory level of understanding in an atmosphere of honesty and trust.

The SD groups open the doors to holding other social events that help create warmer bonds. But Wilson and Atchley cautioned that it isn’t enough to have group members attend a movie and go home afterwards. Incorporating time for talking is always part of suggested social events, from sharing potluck dinners to watching Dave Chappell’s TV show on Comedy Central (it’s easier to discuss afterwards in a dorm suite or other gathering place).

A few students mentioned that it was sometimes difficult to convince minority students to join, to take the risk and trust that their voices will be truly heard.

Having a mix of participants is crucial for success with Sustained Dialogue, members agreed. So far, it seems liberal white students have shown more interest than whites with more conservative viewpoints.

Everyone has something to learn, no matter what they think. "As a middle-class white student, I had never really thought about the fact that it is a privilege, not merely a neutral circumstance, that I do not have to think about my race on a daily basis," Atchley said. In other words, she hadn’t thought about it until joining a Sustained Dialogue group.

At U.Va., the SD groups have held events to bring together groups with different themes, such as the College Republicans and the campus chapter of the National Organization for Women.

Other conference workshops focused on attracting a diverse membership, planning meetings, developing trust among group members, cultivating moderators and completing projects. Some of those projects have led to starting SD for targeted groups, such as high-school and first-year college students, for Arab-Jewish dialogue, and, at U.Va., a group for faculty.

In just four years, U.Va. has created 20 student SD groups, several of which are for first-year students, plus a group devoted to Jewish-Arab dialogue.

Discussing why some individuals stop coming shows how important moderator training is in furthering the SD process. Many of the workshops looked at various aspects of leading groups, practicing techniques and holding mock dialogues to explore issues.

It’s not just group therapy, although there is some overlapping with generic skills for group process, said Randa Slim, vice president of the IISD, who led a workshop on moderating groups through the five stages of Sustained Dialogue. For one thing, moderators need to be well trained to diagnose the transition from one phase to another as the group coalesces, according to Slim. Setting a direction for change, forming solutions and carrying out social-action projects follow the initial growth period of a group. The framework isn’t set in stone, however; groups can move back and forth in the middle stages.

The group is a microcosm for problems in a certain context or setting (at U.Va. or another college campus), which is a subsystem where group identity develops. The subsystem is part of the larger system that the group decides to effect — society.