Center for Ethics and Human Values’ 4Cs: Be curious, charitable, conscientious and constructive, all of which are the center’s civil discourse virtues. Credit: Courtesy of the Center for Ethics and Human Values
In today’s ever-polarized political climate, college-age individuals may be particularly susceptible to anxiety at the prospect of navigating conversations around real-world issues that will likely impact their adult lives.
Center for Ethics and Human Values associate director Aaron Yarmel hopes to change that.
In 2022, the center — also known as CEHV — developed its Civil Discourse for Citizenship program, which “supports undergraduates in the practice of civil discourse” via public forums and other workshops, according to the center’s website. As part of this program, Yarmel decided to establish an on-campus dialogue facilitation program for students, which involves discussion sessions that “train participants to initiate and manage conversations about challenging topics,” according to the center’s website.
Shortly after, Yarmel and other CEHV members established another dialogue facilitation program, Philosophy for Children — also known as P4C — in which local elementary and middle school students engage in facilitated conversation. As a spearhead for dialogue-facilitating initiatives across the Columbus area, Yarmel said he hopes to see more centers, institutes and departments collaborate on workshops.
“Lately, the CEHV has been getting attention from other universities as well as other organizations, including religious organizations, throughout the country that are interested in learning how to facilitate dialogue or experiencing facilitated dialogues,” Yarmel said. “And I foresee CEHV continuing to innovate in that space and create value through collaborations with institutions outside of OSU.”
Jamie Herman, the CEHV’s civil discourse graduate research associate, has been involved with P4C over the past 18 months and has been facilitating on-campus dialogues with Yarmel through the Civil Discourse for Citizenship program for more than a year.
Herman said her research focuses on the dynamics of institutional disagreement — or differing motivations for individuals’ involvement with particular institutions — and how these competing justifications specifically affect universities. In her facilitation efforts with Yarmel, Herman said she has been working toward helping others dismantle their apprehension toward engaging in disagreement.
During one of her P4C inquiry sessions, which comprised a group of middle schoolers discussing their personal values, Herman said she recalls witnessing a special moment where the students realized they had disagreements that did not necessitate a heated debate or argument.
“One of the students at the end of the conversation just pitched to their whole group, turned away from us and was just speaking to the group of students that we were working with and asked, ‘Hey, can we all agree that this won’t affect our friendships going forward?’” Herman said. “It was this beautiful moment.”
Herman said pushing young students to start and sustain in-depth discourse is accompanied by many challenges; even so, she said building trust with students allows them to feel secure enough to share their vulnerable experiences with others.
Yarmel agreed. He said people, particularly educators, should not underestimate children’s intelligence and valuable curiosity.
“I think it’s deeply insulting to young children to treat them like they’re just passive receptacles for knowledge because it underestimates their ability to know things about the world and also fails to prepare them to deliberate with others in the pursuit of answers to the central problems that we face in our lives,” Yarmel said.
Yarmel said the CEHV’s first on-campus dialogue facilitation workshop was in April 2023 and focused on navigating when to bring significant others into shared living spaces. Since then, Yarmel said he, other CEHV faculty and students — mostly involved by way of extracurricular participation — have been working toward developing more dialogue facilitation workshops centered around issues currently salient in the community.
Regarding her experience with the on-campus civil discourse forums — another facet of the Civil Discourse for Citizenship program that involves two opposing viewpoints presenting their respective opinions to an audience — Herman said she relishes sharing the connection with those around her when they collectively realize the assumed disagreement between one another contained more overlapping attitudes than expected.
“I think it’s helpful for the remainder of us in attendance to walk away and be like, ‘OK, I moved past the sort of surface level I had or assumption about the disagreement,’” Herman said.
Yarmel agreed and said this is especially true for college students.
“One of the central purposes for colleges is for students to find better answers to the questions that matter most,” Yarmel said. “There’s some questions about how we ought to live with one another that can’t seem to be given to them by experts. They need to figure it out for themselves in collaboration with others. Properly facilitated dialogues are settings where this can happen.”
Salma Albezreh, a 2022 Undergraduate CEHV Civil Discourse Fellow, attended a dialogue facilitation workshop at which “12 undergraduate students [participated] in an inquiry dialogue about the situation in Israel and Palestine,” according to the event’s application form.
“The first question that we asked as a group was ‘What is the right question for us right now?’” Albezreh said. “The question that they ended up choosing was, ‘When is it appropriate to talk about topics like this on college campuses?’ which was the scope of the conversation.”
Albezreh said for an activist to successfully convey their message, they need to be able to facilitate conversations among themselves.
“Civil discourse is necessary for any sort of movement, particularly within movements,” Albezreh said. “In that sense, it’s not meant to replace other efforts like disruptive activism.”
The CEHV hosts civil discourse forums throughout the year, all of which are open to Ohio State students and anyone from the Columbus community; similarly, Yarmel said he intends to host more dialogue facilitations in the near future. More information about the center’s events can be found on its website.
