ion provides opportunities for discussions that might not otherwise take place, encouraging members of the campus community to engage each other in intellectual and civil discussion. Faculty, staff and students all work toward a deeper, more complex understanding of an issue, creating a more collaborative atmosphere.
Big Question Topic Submissions
Each academic year, the Big Question theme is selected by the Academic Citizenship Steering Committee. If you would like to submit your topic suggestion, please send an email with your name, idea and a brief description of your idea, what you envision it encompassing, and how you think it could be applied to many different situations or groups. Email Betsy Hayes or drop it off at the Academic Citizenship office in Flory Hall room 11.
The Bridgewater Dialogue Club
Engage in meaningful discussions across campus about difficult topics. Join the Dialogue Club.
- Practices and promotes dialogue as a tool for engaging contentious topics on campus
- Is designed to maximize the scope and impact of conversations on campus by offering dialogue design and facilitation skills to the community
- Creates space for new conversations
As a dialogue-trained student, you’ll engage the community in deeper, more reflective conversations on topics that matter. Encourage an alternative to debate. Become a leader on campus.
You’ll be prepared to have effective discussions in the workplace and in everyday life by building these skills.
Learn to reach across divides and differences – cultural, religious, gender, generational, political, and other types of differences in identity, beliefs or values.
Dialogue Club activities include:
- Discussions among club members, to practice facilitation and participation.
- Planning and implementing events to reach the entire campus and discuss relevant topics
- Serving as a resource to the campus by offering to facilitate discussions for other organizations
- Reaching beyond the campus to offer members’ skills to the local community
Faculty/Staff Fellows: Academic Citizenship is a community-wide project in which faculty, staff and students work side-by-side to address issues affecting the Bridgewater community. Faculty can become involved by facilitating discussions, working with the student Dialogue Club to plan extracurricular events, or by hosting the club in their classrooms to aid in discussions of controversial material. For more information on getting involved as a faculty or staff fellow, please contact Jamie Frueh or Betsy Hayes.
The Annual Pedagogy Project
This project gives faculty the time, resources and incentives to develop approaches to teaching that encourage active and collaborative learning. As they do this, they learn how to encourage perspective taking, public reasoning and self-authorship skills.
Perspective-taking involves attending seriously to multiple, often contradictory points of view, navigating differences, and acknowledging that all perspectives should be respectfully heard and critically evaluated.
Public reasoning is the purposeful airing of ideas and positions so that they can be evaluated and refined. As you engage in civil discourse, you must be able to weigh the competing views of others and provide persuasive evidence and arguments to support your own claims.
Self-authorship is the practice of not only taking seriously the perspectives of others but cultivating your own voice to add to the public dialogue.
Past Pedagogy Projects:
- 2012-13: Collaborative Learning
- 2013-14: Writing across the Curriculum
- 2014-15: Public Discourse
- 2015-16: The Flipped Classroom
The Bridgewater Academic Citizenship program has formed a partnership with the Public Conversations Project, an organization based in Massachusetts whose primary goal is to “prevent and transform conflicts driven by deep differences in identity, beliefs, or values.” In addition to leading dialogue training sessions at BC, the Public Conversations Project leads events and dialogues focused on mediating discussions in sectors of global society that need help coming togethe