28 OregonStater.org ART BY IRENE RINALDI C u lt ur e DIFFICULT DIALOGUES New initiatives help students learn how to talk through heated topics. BY > KATHERINE CUSUMANO, MFA ’24 The sun had just set on a November evening last fall as a group of roughly two dozen undergraduates filed into a conference room in the Memorial Union. It had been scarcely a week since the presidential election, and students had come to discuss the outcome. They wrote on sticky ing,who facilitated.“People on both sides were saying, ‘I’m worried about how this will affect me, and I’m worried about how this will affect my relationships.’” She was surprised by the range of opinions shared, and though she found it challenging to take in the stress and fear some participants expressed, she said she left “feeling more connected to the community.” As part of the Community Engagement and Leadership dialogic programming team, Schneider, along with program lead Ismael Rodriguez Cardoso, a junior studying business, was accustomed to coordinating conversations on delicate social and political subjects. They’re called Community Dialogues, and they tend to follow a pattern: After a moderated conversation with an expert on the day’s subject, participants gather into small group round tables to briefly share their experiences. They might be allotted three minutes or given a handful of marbles notes in response to prompts like “How has this election season changed your relationships with people?” and “How confident and informed did you feel around voting?” Then, they talked. “We heard from students that voted for different parties,” said Addie Schneider, a junior studying electrical engineer-
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