MU DIFFICULT DIALOGUES PROGRAM
2009 Summer Institute
The 2009 MU Summer Institute provided participants with intensive, structured time to develop, foster, assess, and improve difficult dialogues within classrooms, departments and campus-wide. This Institute provided an opportunity for campuses to bring together a group of senior campus leaders – including administrators, professional staff and faculty members – to work together toward the creation of a difficult dialogues faculty development program.
Institute development
The Difficult Dialogues Initiative (DDI) was designed to promote academic freedom and religious, cultural, and political pluralism on college and university campuses in the United States. The University of Missouri is one of a handful of universities to receive two DDI grants from the Ford Foundation. The first grant was awarded in 2005, and the renewal grant was received in 2008. The 2009 Summer Institute was designed by program leaders at the University of Missouri, in collaboration with the principal investigators of two other DDI institutional awardees at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Alaska Anchorage. Together, we designed the Institute to provide participants with the foundational information, awareness and skills to develop DDI programs on their own campuses.
Areas of focus
- Capacity building strategies for campus-wide difficult dialogues programs at participating institutions;
- Methods and techniques to create, enhance and assess the effectiveness of faculty development and interactive theatre programs that are part of a comprehensive difficult dialogues faculty development program; and
- Foundational content areas necessary for the implementation of successful difficult dialogues faculty development programs.
Participants at the Institute shared a vision of the need to improve student learning through a commitment to cultural, religious and political pluralism. Institutional teams developed implementation plans during the conference that were used to aid in the creation of difficult dialogues programs at their home campuses.
