Listening is what’s missing now.
We are talking over each other as the politics of deliberate divisiveness take hold. To advocate successfully, even on personal matters, we must listen to others and understand their viewpoints. Only then will they respect ours.
Fortunately, the Wabash Democracy and Public Discourse (WDPD) Fellows are learning to facilitate productive group discussions among community leaders.—Jay Williams, Boston, MA, Member, WDPD Advisory Committee
It’s late in the evening at the end of the semester. Six of the eight Wabash Democracy and Public Discourse Fellows are sitting around a large table in the WDPD office at the back of the Armory computer lab celebrating the jobs seniors Tyler Andrews and Max Nguyen recently accepted.
When I walk in they’re eating cupcakes covered in bright orange and yellow frosting topped with Angry Birds plastic rings.
“Are you here to take pictures?” Andrews asks, laughing. “We’re not prepared for that.”
Their backpacks are stuffed with uncompleted projects; phones chime with reminders of the next meeting that stands between them and sleep.
“I actually got my new job at the Kettering Foundation thanks to the WDPD,” Nguyen says between the others’ coughs and sneezes as spring germs are passed around the table along with the cupcakes.
“If you guys have an interview, talk about WDPD,” Andrews says. “It’s killer. Explain to them, ‘I’ve been a facilitator in deliberations,’ and how you can talk through everything. It sounds amazing — delegation, controlling the way conversation flows. Yeah, they love it.”
Adam Burtner ’17 first realized the potential impact of this work during a chance encounter with a Crawfordsville citizen at the local Cracker Barrel.
“I will never forget the conversation with this guy. He said, ‘You come from Carmel and Zionsville and you stay four years, then you
leave. The community really resents that.’
“There can be a disconnect between Wabash and the community. We have to show the community we’re here to join with them in making it a better place for all of us.”
The inaugural eight WDPD fellows spent most of the first semester learning from rhetoric Professor Sara Drury. Their goal: to follow in W. Norwood Brigance’s footsteps as advocates for free speech.
“We spent a lot of the fall planning, training, and preparing,” Drury says. “Then all of the sudden—boom—we had three events in one week.”
While most of campus was celebrating the sixth consecutive Monon Bell victory, the WDPD Fellows drove through a sleet and ice storm to Champaign-Urbana, IL, where they led a public forum on sustainability efforts. In the same week they guided an in-class deliberation on energy in chemistry, followed by a campus dialogue on race.
The students were leading deliberations between people with often vastly opposing views.
“It was a crazy week,” Drury recalls. “But they got to see the different ways that deliberation can function to pursue different sorts of outcomes for each of the events.”
The beauty of deliberation is the way it teases out the noise around an issue and brings focus for action.
“Think of our process as helping people come together and not just saying the same things over and over but having a conversation,” Drury says.
She is already seeing change emerge in communities they’ve served. After the deliberation in Champaign-Urbana, the hosts thanked the students.
“Then they said, ‘This is a conversation we’ve never had before. It helped us process what it is that’s most important to us, showed us what we really need to be doing if we want to be effective.’”
And at home, the planning, preparation, deliberation, and reporting done for the Quality of Place in Montgomery County discussion the Fellows led in the spring is yielding results, too, informing the Stellar Communities Grant—for which Montgomery County is a finalist—and the fall agenda for the local League of Women Voters.
“Talking to people and understanding their problems, then using leadership or policy to fix that and make their lives better, it’s really rewarding,” says Burtner. “People in the community don’t only say ‘thank you,’ but understand the impact we can have.”
The fellows are changing right along with the communities they are serving, gaining valuable skills—from project management and event planning to research and public speaking—and pushing themselves and one another to grow.
“Now I actually like to get out of my comfort zone,” says Greg Sklar ’17. “Rather than be the guy who sits in the back and let’s everyone else do it, I contribute.”
“I learned how to ask better questions, to construct my argument around what I need to know,” Andrews says. “I’ve learned to get more valuable information out of conversations by really listening to people.”
That includes listening to each other.
“We’re not afraid to share our opinions and how we feel about certain things,” says Anthony Douglas ’17. “A lot of times we find ourselves picking each other’s brains to figure out the best way to approach a problem or the best way to figure something out.
“We’re able to talk to each other. We’re not talking past each other.”
“To AD’s point,” Sklar chimes in. “For the discussion about Yik Yak, we all had our guards down to get creative to bounce ideas off one another. No one was shooting anyone down or anything.”
A team approach prevails.
“All of us are extremely passionate about what we’re doing. We use that inclusive language because we’re all in it to make the fellowship a great thing,” adds Burtner. “Each project may have its own leader, but we all show up to the events and help that person. It’s nice to have a team to back you up.”
Drury was pleasantly surprised at how fluid that team became in a short time.
“The fellows quickly learned each other’s strengths and areas of growth,” she says. “That didn’t mean everybody who was strong in those tasks did those tasks. Rather they would say, ‘Well you haven’t facilitated in this setting yet; you should be one of the facilitators.’ Or, ‘I emceed this event already, why don’t you emcee this one and we’ll put you with him because he’s a really good emcee and you’ll be able to learn from him?’
“It was like they became each other’s coaches,
each other’s instructors.”
The interests of the original eight fellows—six sophomores and two seniors—range from politics and foreign language to research and medicine. Some are home-grown Hoosiers; one is a Vietnam native. But as they wrap up their late evening conversation and cupcakes at the end of the semester, they all see that being part of the fellowship has given them skills they will utilize well beyond receiving their sheepskins.
“Before I joined the initiative I was very concerned about civic engagement in general because I could see it was declining,” says Nyguyen. “I feel I’ve developed the skills needed to be civilly engaged and at the same time also lead people within the community.”
Kyle Stucker ’17 is focused on pre-med.
“As a doctor, it’s very important to be able to communicate exactly what diagnoses or what symptoms or certain treatments need to be presented to
the patient,” he says, “but you also need to be able to do so in a manner that makes patients feel welcomed and accepted or understood.”
“The skills are very transferable. There will always be problems. There will always be issues,” says Douglas. “There will always be a need for communication to work through or find some type of solution.”
As Burtner concludes, “This is really just the beginning.”