Dialogue Across Difference: Practice, Theory, and Research on Intergroup Dialogue

Epilogue. Intergroup Dialogue Alumni in a Changing World

EPIloGuE Intergroup Dialogue Alumni in a Changing World As we were finishing this book, it seemed only right that we end with words and lives of students who were actively involved in intergroup dialogue (IGD) as undergraduates and who have now graduated. We invited twelve graduates to share their experiences in intergroup dialogue, and all of them responded with reflection essays. These essays convey purposefulness as engaged graduates who are trying to advance social justice across a range of professional fields—medicine, nursing, social work, law, public health, business and finance, the arts, education, and public policy. They write of the continuing impact of their intergroup dialogue experiences in what they are doing professionally and personally. By no means are we claiming that they are representative of the participants in the broader study. They are simply graduates from the universities of two of the authors. We knew them to have been actively involved with intergroup dialogue during their college years and as graduates who could reflect on how their postcollege years address the demographic, democratic, and dispersion challenges that frame this book. When we asked them to respond to us about their current lives, we knew little about their lives after graduation. We chose them because they were leaders during their college years. They participated in intergroup dialogue and facilitated dialogues, and in some cases played other leadership roles in IGD programs. They are still leaders trying to foster the major aims of 356 DIALOGUE ACROSS DIFFERENCE IGD—greater intergroup understanding, positive intergroup relationships, and collaborative social action. We specifically asked them to describe what they are currently doing and to reflect on how their work and lives deal with the three challenges that frame this book. To elucidate those challenges, we sent them a draft of chapter 10 of the book and asked them to write essay responses to the following four questions: What are you currently doing professionally and how did your experiences in intergroup dialogue play a role in your professional direction? In what ways is your work addressing inequalities and is aimed at creating greater social justice? (the democratic challenge) In what ways are you professionally and personally engaged with people from various identity groups and how are you bridging differences by bringing people together? (the demographic challenge) In what ways are you involved with people in or from other countries? In what ways do you consider yourself a global citizen? (the dispersion challenge) In the remainder of this epilogue, we share the uniqueness of each of the graduates and the themes we discerned across their essays in relation to the three challenges. ThE DEMocRATIc chAllENGE: ADDREssING INEQuAlITIEs We begin by introducing these twelve graduates, identifying them—with their agreement—by name, and showing how their current work, preparation for future work, and personal lives address inequalities. The democratic challenge drew the lion’s share of their writing. We believe that reflects that the primary continuing impact of intergroup dialogue is pressing them to do something about inequalities and to conceive of themselves as responsible social change agents. They write of rural-urban inequalities, health disparities , educational inequalities, and economic inequalities. Adam Falkner, a white man, is in his sixth year teaching eleventh-grade English and Creative Writing at the Academy for Young Writers in Brooklyn, EPILOGUE 357 New York. He is also a poet, performer, educational consultant, and the founder and executive director of the Dialogue Arts Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using creative writing and performing arts in what we call a democratic project—promoting the exploration of identity and critical dialogue between students, artists, and educators to make society more just. Its primary aim is to help young people, especially less privileged young people whose opportunities are constrained by inequalities that they face, to become healthy, contributing members of society. Adam writes, To say that my experience in intergroup dialogue influenced my professional direction would be a wild understatement. . . . [As a teacher] I knew that I wanted to be responsible for facilitating dialogue and balancing voices in an intergroup setting, and I was given an early look at a highly effective classroom . I was also moved by IGR’s [The Program on Intergroup Relations at the University of Michigan] belief in the universal human need for communication across lines of identity, and the extent to which the dialogue environments IGR created gave permission for that unspoken want to surface in...