Dear MindWell Pod and Friends,
Semel Healthy Campus Initiative (HCI) Center MindWell Pod in Collaboration with Student Affairs offers this quarter’s Meeting of the Minds . This quarter’s topic:
Introduction to Intergroup Dialogue Principles: An Approach to Difficult Dialogue, offered virtually by renowned trainer Dr. Anna Yeakley
Wednesday, December 4, 2:30-4pm via zoom.
Zoom: https://ucla-hipaa.zoom.us/j/93232346060?pwd=TJ6PJTmfA7mSOH100CLnVa6QzQFI2d.1
Meeting ID: 932 3234 6060
Passcode: 698759
RSVP Here: https://forms.gle/VD1rZ4oJ1KqWUZTF7
Please consider this 90 minute introductory training to important skills to improve our ability to address difficult topics across differences. Add tools to your tool kit.
Anna M. Yeakley, PhD, MSW, currently serves as a national trainer and consultant in intergroup dialogue, facilitation, inclusive teaching practices, and strategies for responding to conflict. Anna has over 25 years of intergroup dialogue facilitation, training, program administration, and research experience, and has helped to develop new intergroup dialogue programs at 11 college campuses across the country. One of the largest programs she helped to develop was at UCLA, where she was the Director of the Intergroup Relations Program and a faculty instructor for the intergroup dialogue and facilitation training courses in the UCLA School of Education.
Anna has led online dialogue facilitation trainings for higher education faculty, staff, and administrators, as well as K-12 teachers and community practitioners from across the country since 2019, and provided dialogue facilitation training to officers and enlisted from the United States Air Force from 2021-2022.
Anna was trained in intergroup dialogue as a Social Work and Social Psychology doctoral student at the University of Michigan. Much of her passion comes from her personal experience growing up in a bi-cultural, bilingual, immigrant family, and being a college student caught in the middle of the inter-ethnic tensions that took place during the Los Angeles Riots/Uprising in 1992
About Intergroup Dialogues
Intergroup Dialogues Introduced at the University of Michigan over 35 years ago, Intergroup Dialogues (IGD) bring together participants of different social identities (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious identity, ability status, citizenship/immigration status, socio-economic background, etc.) to learn about their differences and similarities in social identities and their perspectives on diversity and campus climate issues. As a facilitated, structured approach for engaging in face-to-face interactions around issues of diversity, intergroup dialogues have the following objectives:
1. To develop intergroup understanding by helping participants explore their own and others’ social identities and statuses, and the role of social structure in relationships of privilege and inequality;
2. To foster positive intergroup relationships by developing participants’ empathy and motivation to bridge differences of identities and statuses; and
3. To foster intergroup collaboration for personal and social responsibility toward greater social justice (Nagda et al., 2009, p.4).
The intergroup dialogues follow a 4-stage model and developmental curriculum that follows a progression of learning and skill development. Attendance at all sessions is important, as the learning is experiential and emerges from the group as the participants share about their identities, experiences and perspectives with one another. Although the participants are often eager to jump into the controversial hot topics, intergroup dialogues (IGD) provide the participants with an initial foundation of communication skills to support them in engaging with different (even opposing) perspectives. Once the foundational skills and relationships have been built within the group, the participants are then able to listen to understand those they disagree with and develop empathy with those who have had different experiences, thus promoting positive relationships, understanding, and collaboration across identities (see Zuñiga et al., 2007, for a detailed description of the IGD curriculum).
Effectiveness of IGD Reporting on a multi-university longitudinal study of intergroup dialogue courses across 10 campuses, Nagda et al. (2009) state: “Analyses of pre- and post-survey data indicate that intergroup dialogue produces consistent positive effects across all three categories of outcomes: Intergroup Understanding, Intergroup Relationships, and Intergroup Collaboration and Engagement.” Sorensen at al. (2009) expand on this statement in a full-length article. Not only has the approach been found effective in the study cited here, as well as in other research studies, it has also received awards for its effectiveness, such as: • In their final report, The Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of America (2017), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences makes a case for the importance of intergroup dialogues and lists the Program on Intergroup Relations as a “best practice” (see page 13). • President Clinton’s Initiative on Race citation as one of fourteen “Promising Practices” that “successfully bridge racial divides in American communities.” • The U.S. Department of Education’s Gender Equity Project citation as a “Promising Intervention” in the “prevention of sexual and racial harassment and violence against students in higher education.” The panel rated IGR as “excellent” on significance and usefulness to others/replicability. • The American Association of Higher Education, the American College Personnel Association, and the National Association of Student Personnel citation as an “Exemplary Practice” (1998). • A Certificate of Excellence in the Theodore M. Hesburgh Awards Program of TIAA-CREF (2000). Intergroup dialogue programs have now expanded to over 130 college campuses across the United States (including Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, Purdue, UCLA, UMass-Amherst, Villanova, and many others), with the outcomes and methodologies of different programs shared at biennial Intergroup Dialogue conferences, at Skidmore College in June 2015, Cornell University in June 2017, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2019, and Mount Holyoke College in 2023.