Houston Hall (341 Spruce Street), Room 218
In-Person Event: Please register here.
Presented by the SNF Paideia Program.

HOW CAN WE BOTH PROMOTE OPEN DISCOURSE AND PROTECT STUDENTS FROM HARM? Join us for a community dialogue event that brings together educators + students from a variety of Philadelphia campuses – from high school to higher ed – to share insights and experiences from each participant’s unique context and perspective. Conversants and audience members alike will respond to Dr. SIGAL BEN-PORATH’s “inclusive freedom” framework for campus speech, which places equal importance on the right of all voices to be included and the right of all ideas to be expressed.

This non-traditional, participatory event will model a number of structures that support equitable inclusion in dialogue, so that all participants truly feel free to speak. This won’t be a debate, a panel discussion, or a series of speaker presentations. Instead, in the first half of this community dialogue, our invited conversants will engage in a facilitated conversation with one another, modeling non-hierarchical, equitable dialogue across difference. In the second half, audience members will respond to this conversation and engage with a set of discussion questions in small-group dialogues. Attendees will come away with new strategies for participating in and facilitating inclusive, open dialogue, as well as new appreciation of the unique complexities of practicing intellectual freedom in different local educational contexts.

Organizer and Facilitator: SARAH ROPP is a multi-lingual teacher and researcher of dialogue across difference with 20 years of experience in cross-cultural communication, including diverse teaching experiences in the U.S. and abroad. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy and the SNF Paideia Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Featured Dialogue Participant: SIGAL BEN-PORATH is Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Free Speech on Campus (2017).