The Doyle Engaging Difference Program - Georgetown University

This invitation-only workshop offered practice in the University of Michigan’s model for Intergroup Dialogue (IGD). This is an empirically based pedagogy for diversity/justice education, which has been utilized at Georgetown, and is also employed by dozens of other universities across the country. Workshop participants were introduced to IGD pedagogy experientially. This experiential emphasis included asking the participants to engage in some IGD exercises and experiences about diversity, conflict, and community. Some self-disclosure and self-examination was invited, within the limits of the participants’ own willingness and comfort.

This basic introduction was primarily to demonstrate the pedagogy, with some implications for how participants might use the pedagogy in their own teaching and programming. Applications will include a) use of the pedagogy to establish formal dialogue courses and co-curricular programs, in which participants meet regularly over a sustained period of time for dialogue, and b) use of the assumptions and methods of the pedagogy in less formal classroom, co-curricular, and interpersonal interactions about difficult issues of social identity and diversity.