Research Project Aims to Engage Undergraduates in Critical Conversations

SSW faculty members Peggy O’Neill and Annemarie Gockel, together with Smith College professor of psychology Nnamdi Pole, this year launched a research study bringing the Critical Conversations model to Smith undergraduates.

Supported by grants from multiple sources, the project will create student groups on campus whose mission is to embark on deep discussions about social justice, activism and oppression in all its forms.

“It’s an opportunity to construct healthy dialogue toward a more just community and environment and world,” said O’Neill.

Developed in 2015 by O’Neill and SSW colleague Hye-Kyung Kang, the model seeks to illuminate power dynamics within a social context to allow for deeper examination and reflection that ultimately ushers in change on multiple levels, including personal, systemic and institutional.

“It’s relational,” she said. “That’s exciting to me.”

O’Neill said the model asks facilitators to articulate unspoken dynamics during a conversation about loaded topics such as racism or classism, for example, by identifying power imbalances when they come into play.

The goal is to help participants develop skills to both understand people with opposing views and build relationships with others whose perspectives differ significantly from their own.

In short, the project seeks to cut to the heart of the divisions now roiling the nation.

“We’re in a crisis in the country in terms of being able to talk about issues of power, yet these conversations are inevitably happening,” said Gockel. Without a mechanism that articulates in a conscious way the power dynamics at play, Gockel and O’Neill believe such conversations will be ineffective, and possibly even harmful.

“The intention is to resolve, but what often happens is that the conversations reenact the issues themselves,” said Gockel. “Although we’re intending to have understanding, often they reinforce the divisions that existed. The intention is to interrupt the enactments by naming them to bring them into the conversations.”

Gockel sees the model as one that invites participants to consider power dynamics in action in a way that brings greater understanding. In other words, she said, “How can we reach across the forces of oppression that divide us?”

Through their two-year research project, O’Neill and Gockel aim to find out the extent to which the Critical Conversations model can be that bridge.

“This model invites the instructor to say ‘something just happened that feels substantive that impacts our learning.’ It invites people to step into the conversation by naming it,” O’Neill said.

The model was introduced to the SSW campus through faculty training and engagement in a multi-year effort, begun in 2016, to prepare faculty to better guide conversations on these difficult topics within their classrooms and other group settings.

“The model is morphing in a way that we’re working to apply it in a created situation so we’ll jump-start a conversation about social justice issues,” said O’Neill.

O’Neill and Gockel believe initiating such conversations has the potential to create social change around issues in which embedded power dynamics can make conversations explosive. “These are critical issues for our community here at Smith and critical issues in our nation,” said Gockel. —Laurie Loisel