Participants and Expertise

Participants
While the intention of dialogues is to bring together a diverse group of participants, care must be taken to insure that the participants invited are interested in the topic and likely to agree to basic rules of civil discussion.

Getting started - In many cases, you may wish to begin dialoguing with students who have been engaged such as those who have been involved in community service or campus political activities. These students have already given some thought to the issue of civic engagement and are the most likely to take an interest in the dialogue process. It is important within this description to think about including students from diverse backgrounds including gender, race and ethnicity, sexual preference, and age/year in school.

Inviting select students - In rare cases, you may want to offer dialogues to a very select group of students if your intention is to use the dialogue to promote some specific policy or goal. (See Public Policy Dialogue.)

Inviting the non-engaged - Eventually, the most successful dialogues will involve students who demonstrate no obvious interest in current campus efforts to engage students in public issues. These students can contribute greatly to our understanding of civic participation as they too frequently get lumped into an “apathetic” category without efforts to really understand why they choose not to participate.

Contact with participants before the meeting - If the number of participants is small and you know who they will be in advance, contacting them before the gathering can be very helpful in alerting them to the topic, purpose and tone of the meeting and making them feel welcome. This can be done by phone or e-mail.

Beyond student participants - Some students have expressed concern that far too often students dialogue among themselves but should be carrying on these conversations with faculty, staff and members of the larger community. There is a delicate balance between a somewhat homogeneous group of participants (all students, all students committed to community service, all students who are leaders of community outreach efforts) and more heterogeneous groups (Students and faculty, student and community members). The more heterogeneous the group is, the richer the dialogue but the more the likelihood of conflict that must be managed by the facilitator. This poses very real problems if the facilitator is a student and the person dominating the floor is a faculty member.

As a campus gets comfortable with dialogues, they may wish to move toward including a wider group of participants. And of course, if a facilitator is comfortable with inviting a broader array of participants from the beginning, their efforts are to be commended.

Getting Students to the Dialogue: Mapping Stakeholders

You may be committed to the idea of initiating conversation on your campus- or with other campuses close by, but are not sure where to start. One of the best ways to start is by “mapping” stakeholders on your campus and starting by contacting those stakeholders and asking them to co-host the dialogue or just come to the dialogue you are planning. Stakeholders look different depending on your dialogue topic and your campus. However, there are a few questions you can ask yourself to quickly get an idea of who you should invite:

What is your issue? Who are the people who have
a “stake” or “interest” in this issue?

Here is a list of some potential stakeholders. For each stakeholder, think about where they are located on your campus, how you can contact them, and what interest they may have in partnering with you or helping to recruit students to come to your dialogue. People are willing to help; very often it just requires someone to “ask the right question.”

Once you have made all the arrangements for your dialogue, one of the most effective tools to get people to come is through personal invitations. Invite people over the phone and in-person- as well as post flyers and emails. Those personally invited are much more likely to attend and get others to attend. In addition, make reminder phone calls the night before the dialogue to make sure people know it is important to you that they show up and that their participation is valued.

Expertise
It is valuable to work closely with one or more campus advisors (faculty or staff members) as you plan your dialogue. These advisors may be able to provide you with helpful information about how to get things done within the institution. Knowledge of how to navigate the bureaucracies of colleges and universities takes time to develop and a faculty or staff member who has been at the institution for some time can often save you valuable time and help you avoid making errors.

As you plan your dialogue, think carefully about whether or not it would be helpful to have a subject matter expert join you for the dialogue. Think about how an expert from campus might help frame an issue and provide clarification during the dialogue. You might also invite an expert from off campus. If your dialogue is on a topic such as university marketing of sweatshop products, you might bring in a student from another campus who has been involved in the issue and/or a reporter who has done stories for the local paper.

Think carefully about the role of any expert you invite and be sure that the expert knows of and agrees to the limits of their participation. A way to think about the role of the expert is to have experts “on tap, not “on top.” Think too about how an expert might hamper free conversation by students who might not be comfortable sharing their ideas with employees of the college or university or someone who might think their ideas are too naive.