The Pluralism Project at Harvard University

This report is the result of a series of interviews and research with various members of the Sharon Interfaith Youth Leadership Program in Sharon, Massachusetts, to identify the programs they perceived to be most effective in generating dialogue. For more information on the Sharon Interfaith Youth Leadership Program, see the group's profile.

Although "dialogue" may invoke images of roundtable conversation, the dialogue that takes place in the Sharon Interfaith Youth Leadership Program may not always include words or speaking. Members of the group identified some of their best practices in models that involve alternative modes of communication--including visual aids or stimulants to discussion, time-limited comments in dialogue (not conversation), and nonverbal communication. Janet Penn, the program's director, said a central part of the program is "learning to rethink some of the basic assumptions about how we think and communicate."

Although reflection, in the form of more traditional discussion, is a part of every meeting of the youth leadership program, the group's meetings begin with an activity structured to create an entry point into such conversations and to engage high school students in a creative format. These activities may focus on interfaith learning (education about different religions), examining one's values or convictions, or addressing a specific issue for discussion.

Student Leadership

The Sharon Interfaith Youth Leadership Program seeks to put as much power as possible into the hands of students. All programs and activities are led by high school seniors, who bear the title of "assistant facilitators." Adult facilitators of the group serve in advisory positions to the student leadership, meeting with the students to discuss structure and design of programs as well as scheduling. Any conflicts or disagreements are resolved by a vote of all members under the age of 18. The students in the program not only lead programs for their fellow students at the bi-weekly meetings, but are also called upon to lead community dialogues with the adults in Sharon, as well as conducting workshops at local middle schools for the students there.

Interfaith Learning

When focusing on interfaith learning, the group generally starts with an interactive activity that allows students to share from their own faith experiences while learning from those of their peers.

Visual Aid to Dialogue: The "Cube"
Students Facilitating Student Dialogue
One such example involving a visual aid is the "cube" exercise, which involves a large cardboard cube with various topics written on each side. The group sits in a circle, and each person has a turn to toss the cube into the middle of the circle and speak about the subject on which it lands. The exercise can be modified for any topic a group wants to discuss, and provides a different approach to the questions than having a moderator read them aloud. In one of the versions used by the Sharon group, the following topics were listed on the cube:

Group Work and Sharing: Life Cycle Rituals Activity
Students Facilitating Student Dialogue
Another example of an interfaith learning exercise that Penn said worked particularly well was an exercise on rituals. In this activity, the students split into four groups, with representatives from each religion present in the group (insofar as that was possible). The groups explored birth rituals, coming of age rituals, marriage rituals and death rituals, respectively. The students were to discuss and write down how their tradition celebrates or marks the particular life cycle moment their group was considering. They were told to consider the following elements of the ritual:
After this basic description, the groups were told to consider any "issues" that may arise and how they would be addressed—a stillborn child, an interfaith marriage, and so on. Finally, the groups were to look for commonalities between the traditions for their particular life cycle rite and write an "interfaith prayer." The criterion for inclusion in the prayer was that any element or idea mentioned must be common to all four traditions. Even if an element was agreeable or common to three out of the four, it could not be included. The groups then presented their findings to the rest of the group and shared their interfaith prayer. Penn said this was a particularly effective program, especially the exercise of formulating an interfaith prayer, because it made the students acutely aware of how little there was in common between the traditions. Though students may tend to focus on similarities between the traditions, such an exercise forced them to look at where the real points of difference were between the traditions in their approach to life cycle rites.

Examining Values and Convictions

Though sometimes the group's meetings are focused on a more objective "learning" aspect, at other times the students participate in activities that ask them to take a "stance" on certain issues or to express their own beliefs, values and convictions. Though this sometimes takes the form of a group conversation (such as one meeting centered on the topic of what happens when one's personal beliefs contradict the religious teachings of one's tradition), often it is expressed through symbolic activities.

Nonverbal Communication: "Here I Stand" Exercise
Students Facilitating Student Dialogue
One effective means of communicating beliefs and values is an activity called "Here I Stand," designed by the Anti-Defamation League's "A World of Difference" Institute. In this exercise, statements are read and students are asked to "take a stand," literally, along a line, with one end labeled "agree" and the other end "disagree." Examples of such statements include: "Anyone can become successful in the U.S. by working hard," "I feel comfortable working in groups where I am the only person of my race," "Interreligious marriage is good," and so on. Through this exercise, in which there is no talking, students express visually and physically their beliefs and opinions. In the reflection afterwards, students are asked to consider whether they felt the need to explain why they took the position they did on various issues.

A modified version of this exercise was used on the subject of fear. This activity was spurred by the release of Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" in March 2004 and the concerns over the film's potential to stir up anti-Semitism. At the youth leadership program meeting that month, the students expressed their fears through a modified "Here I Stand" exercise in which the ends of the line were labeled "I have no fear" and "I'm very afraid of," and students were asked to respond to a wide variety of potential fears, from the very trivial ("spinach or other green veggies") to the very serious ("being raped," "terrorist attack in the U.S."). The religious issues addressed included fear over sharing one's religious beliefs, fear of God or of not doing God's will, fear of going to hell or fear that "something bad will happen to you if you don't follow certain rituals or say a prayer correctly."

Issue-Oriented Dialogue

The issues addressed by the youth leadership program often center on stereotyping, prejudice, and fears. In an attempt to bridge religious, cultural and racial divides, the group often starts with confronting and analyzing stereotypes about various groups. Oftentimes the youth serve in the position of facilitators in bringing these discussions to a variety of audiences in the Sharon community, including middle school students and adults.

Writing Activity: Stereotypes
Students Facilitating Student Dialogue
Gayle Gordon, a 2004 graduate of Sharon High School who was involved in the youth leadership program throughout her high school experience, said the activities that make people most uncomfortable often spur the best discussion afterwards. She recalled an activity that involved placing large pieces of paper, labeled with various groups (Jews, teenagers, African-Americans, middle school students, etc.), on the walls of the room. The students were then asked to go around the room and write at least one stereotype about each group on each piece of paper, something that was especially uncomfortable in a multiracial, multireligious group. The facilitators emphasized that writing the stereotype down did not indicate a person's agreement with that stereotype, but simply an identification that they had heard the stereotype used. Gordon said people's uneasiness with the exercise provided a fruitful starting point for the discussion she facilitated, since she was able to ask people to talk about what specifically made them uncomfortable about the exercise.

Nonverbal Communication: MLK Day "Opportunity Walk"
Students Facilitating Adult Dialogue
Other exercises involve nonverbal communication to address issues of privilege and discrimination. For the Sharon community's commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the youth leadership program sponsored a "community conversation about race," which centered on an activity called an "opportunity walk." In this exercise, all people stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a line, and as statements were read, they took steps either forward or backward, depending on whether the statement with which they identified was an advantage or disadvantage. Statements were intended to bring forth the various privileges that some members of the community may have had over others. Some examples of the statements included: "If most of your adult family members worked in careers requiring a college education when you were a child, take a step forward." "If one of your parents was ever unemployed, not by choice, take a step back." "If you ever flew in an airplane to go on vacation when you were under eighteen, take a step forward." "If your ancestors were native people in a land that was later colonized by Europeans, take a step back." At the end of the walk, people were asked to notice where they stood in relation to the others in the room, and to make the symbolic observation that those out in front of the group may not necessarily see what's going on behind them unless they make an effort to turn around and look, whereas those in the back could clearly see who was in front of them and were very aware of their own position relative to others'.

Writing, Visual Aids, and Role Playing: Labeling Workshop
Students Facilitating Middle School Dialogue
The youth leadership program also works regularly with middle school students in the area. In response to a request from the principal of a local private middle school, the high school students of the youth leadership program led a workshop on labeling to address a problem with stereotyping and bullying that had arisen among the sixth-graders. In this workshop, the students used two activities. In the first, the middle school students were split into groups and given a picture of a person. They were asked to describe that person by their appearance—"what are the first words that come to your mind when you look at this picture?" and to speculate about the person's age, hometown, likes and dislikes, and what kind of friends this person would have. The students were then told "the facts" about the people they had just labeled. Many of these pictures did not conform to the likely stereotypes from appearance—for example, a particularly clean-cut and "normal"-looking man turned out to be a serial killer.

The second activity was a role play in which students were asked to put literal "labels" (stickers) on their heads with words on them. The words were generated from a brainstorming session with the students about names and labels they had been hearing around school. The students in the role play were unaware of what label was on their own forehead, though they were to read and react to the labels on the other students' heads. The rest of the class observed their interactions. After the role play, students were asked to talk about their feelings during the exercise, and the observing audience was asked to talk about what they could do if they saw such labeling occurring in a real-life setting.

Partnering With Community Organizations

Janet Penn, the program's director, stressed the effectiveness of the partnerships the group has developed with the local community, in a variety of forms. In partnering with Sharon Middle School to offer regular dialogue sessions to middle school students, led by their elder high school peers, the group has increased their presence in the community and raised awareness of the issues of religious and racial diversity at an even earlier level--as well as sparking interest in their program among middle school students, some of whom later go on to participate in the program in their high school years. The group also reaches out to the larger community, as seen in events like the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day "community conversation about race" that the youth leadership program sponsored. The group has also partnered with the interfaith clergy association in town to promote dialogue among the religious leaders in the community. Penn said she thinks programs can be more successful when connections are made, bringing people together and sharing resources.

Importance of Structure

Even when communicating verbally, "dialogue" is significantly more structured than normal communication. Penn stressed that dialogue is "not conversation." The emphasis is on listening rather than responding to other's comments. When approaching a subject in dialogue, participants are each given two to three minutes to address the subject at hand, using "I" statements, and are not allowed to respond to statements made by others in the group (if they have questions or comments for another person, they are told to write down their thoughts to bring up at a later date). Penn said this kind of direct dialogue had been more common with the adult dialogues in Sharon, but she would like to see the students do more of it as well.

All dialogue is focused by a set of "ground rules," and all students in the program must go through a six-hour facilitator training session during their first year in the program. One of the central "ground rules" is to speak from one's own perspective, using "I" statements rather than "you" statements, which can sound judgmental. Facilitators learn techniques for keeping conversations on the subject and preventing a few individuals from monopolizing discussion. The curriculum for this training is developed and run by the adult facilitators in the program, with some of the sessions taught by the senior student assistant facilitators.

Limits of Structure

Though structure is essential for approaching a dialogue session, some members of the group acknowledged the limits of such highly-structured interactions. Student facilitators Gayle Gordon and Rebecca Dalgin both communicated their dislike for an excess of structure to the meetings. Dalgin said that the models and formats were useful as long as they were flexible and not rigidly followed. They both said it was important to be able to address issues that may arise in the course of the session that may not necessarily fit into the structured plan.

Roger Bourassa, an adult facilitator of the group, said he would like to see the students in the program interacting in more "real life" scenarios in addition to the work they do in meetings. While the group's activities can spark interesting discussion and bring up thoughtful issues, he pointed out that this does not always translate to "real life" for the students. He said he would like to see the group do more activities outside of a school setting, where the students would have a change to interact in a larger, "less safe" group. He cited an example of a recent trip that some students from the group took to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Bourassa said it was much harder for the other students to be "tolerant and accepting" when one Muslim student considered it a sin to listen to music in the car than it had been to be "accepting of difference" in the abstract world of the dialogue sessions.