Structured Democratic Dialogue

What is Structured Democratic Dialogue?

The Co-Laboratory to “Address Racial, Economic, and Educational Inequalities through Our University Network“ was organized by Future Worlds Center and Innovative Compliance Europe Ltd on behalf of the OSUN Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. The methodology utilized to facilitate the Co-Lab was the Structured Democratic Dialogue process, supported by specialized tools.

The Co-Laboratory was held as a series of online virtual events during March 2021. Eighteen academics and students from eight OSUN Universities and Colleges came together to propose actions that could be implemented either locally or through OSUN to improve educational access for disadvantaged students. The participants came from very differing cultural, economic, and societal backgrounds across OSUN, and included academics and students, with equitable cross-gender distribution. The participants represented both OSUN founding institutions (e.g., Bard College and CEU) and a broad cross section of European (Bard Berlin, American University in Bulgaria) Middle Eastern (Al-Quds Bard) and Asian (BRAC University, American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyz- stan) OSUN members. Two participants were OSUN students who reside in refugee camps.

During the first online Co-Laboratory session...

... many of the OSUN students commented, even before introducing themselves to the group, that they wished to thank Bard College Hosts for providing this opportunity for their voices to be heard on this important subject. In the participants surveys OSUN students highlighted the importance they attributed for their ideas and their clarifications being treated as equally important to those from the Professor and Lecturer participants. The extremely high level of response in two Co-Laboratory participant surveys was unprecedented.

To facilitate the dialogue process, a Triggering Question2 was formulated as “What initiatives/actions could the communities of faculty/staff/students around the Open Society University Network take that would contribute towards narrowing racial, economic, and educational inequalities?” The Triggering Question and the goal of the process were communicated to all participants one week before the initial online Co-Lab virtual session. In response to this question, the participants put forth 40 proposals of initiatives/actions capable of addressing the challenge. Using a bottom-up clustering approach, the participants identified 10 “dimensions”. Community Building was the most common dimension that appeared in 8 actions, to be followed closely by Funding and Scholarships and Accessible Education (each with 5 actions). Raising Awareness appeared in 4 actions closely followed by Admissions and Outreach, Educational Resources and Support, Democracy, Advocacy and Human Rights, and Employment Opportunities each of which appeared in 3 actions. Following a selection of ideas using preference voting, the participants used Interpretive Structural Modeling to explore whether one idea could support another, thus constructing a tree of influences.

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