Matthew Worwood: Creativity is often described as generating new ideas, but new ideas rarely emerge from rooms where everyone thinks the same way they grow. When we encounter perspectives that challenge our own, that requires dialogue, not debate, not performance, but a genuine effort to understand another person’s point of view.

Matthew Worwood: In a time marked by polarization and strong emotion. Learning how to engage constructively may be one of the most important skills we can teach because understanding others expands the very boundaries of our own creativity. That’s why today we welcome to the show, Caroline Mell, co-founder and executive director of the Constructive Dialogue Institute.

Caroline Mehl: Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Ward, and my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This is the Fueling Creativity in Education Podcast. On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the fields of education. We’ll be talking with scholars, educators. And resident experts about their work challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity, all with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood: So let’s begin.

Cyndi Burnett: Today we welcome to the show Caroline Mel, who is the co-founder and executive director for the Constructive Dialogue Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit that partners with colleges and universities to build cultures of inquiry and dialogue. Since its founding in 2017, CDI has partnered with more than 150 campuses across the country.

Cyndi Burnett: Caroline’s writing has been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education inside Higher Ed Time, and the Harvard Business Review. She’s on the advisory board of two national initiatives, working to heal our country’s divide. Disagree, better. And Builders. Welcome to the She Caroline.

Caroline Mehl: For having me.

Cyndi Burnett: So Caroline, when Matt and I recorded our season 12 kickoff, we talked about the conversations we were most looking forward to having.

Cyndi Burnett: And this was at the top of both of our lists because I feel there’s so much polarization and tension right now. In society and the world, and I believe a strong path forward is through constructive dialogue. So I’m so excited to have you on the show to talk about this.

Cyndi Burnett: And where we’d like to begin is can you give us a little bit more about the Constructive Dialogue Institute and your role in this organization?

Caroline Mehl: Yeah, absolutely. So I am the co-founder and executive director of the Constructive Dialogue Institute. And we go by CDI for short, because I know that’s a mouthful.

Caroline Mehl: And we started, I started the organization with the psychologist, Jonathan. He, in 2017, really in response to exactly what you just described, rising polarization, social division, especially in the aftermath of the presidential election. And John and I were just. Deeply concerned about what this meant for the future of our democracy, as we had, you know, really lost the ability to communicate across lines of difference, understand people with different perspectives.

Caroline Mehl: We just saw this as really a tremendous threat to our society. And so at the same time, what we recognized was there was all this great. Research and the behavioral sciences that helped us make sense of what was happening. You know, why was, why are we suddenly so divided? How is it possible that people were looking at the same set of facts and reaching wildly different conclusions?

Caroline Mehl: Where do differences in worldview and values come from, and what does the research tell us about how to navigate those differences more effectively? Especially back in 2017, that research was really trapped in the ivory tower. No one was really talking about it in, in the mainstream or talking about it in an applied way.

Caroline Mehl: And so we wanted to bring that research to life and you know, similarly to what I think you’re trying to accomplish through podcast of bridging the gap between, research around and actually that classroom that was as well. How do. The academic and school environment such that young people, the next generation, were gaining these skills, practicing these skills so that we could equip them with the mindset and skillset to communicate and collaborate across lines of difference.

Matthew Worwood: And it’s interesting that , you’re using the word skills , to build on Cindy’s opening. Her and I have been having this conversation about polarization and to a certain extent there’s no other word to it. At times it feels like people are expressing hate from one group to the other, to such an extent that they don’t wanna listen to , anything that the other person has to say.

Matthew Worwood: So there is a skillset to navigate those situations. Does that speak a little bit to the idea of constructive dialogue?

Caroline Mehl: Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate that you’re naming this question around skillset because we are very intentional about teaching what we refer to as mindset and skillset. Oh, and the problem in the gap that I often see in this work is that if you just focus on the skills, there are of course very practical, tangible skills, and I’ll get into that, around how do you have the conversations.

Caroline Mehl: But if you are coming from a place of, deep tribalism and really assuming that the other person. Is not worthy of a conversation. You don’t treat them with dignity and respect. You’re not gonna employ those skills because they don’t seem worthy of it.

Caroline Mehl: So, doing that mindset work is really important as well. And I can get into that in a little bit more. Specifics as well. But just to, tie back to the definition of constructive dialogue, what makes something constructive, dialogue versus something else? The way that we define constructive dialogue is a form of conversation.

Caroline Mehl: People with different perspectives seek to understand one another without abandoning their own beliefs in order to live, learn, and work together. what’s really important about some of the components there, and I’ll just focus on piece to begin with, is without abandoning their own beliefs. So when we talk about this work just sometimes this is.

Caroline Mehl: People sometimes react very negatively to it because they say, oh, this is just about kind of papering over differences or, coming to some kind of squishy middle, or you’re just trying to make everyone a moderate. And that’s really not what constructive dialogue is about. It’s about recognizing that people are coming to conversations with really deep convictions, and the goal of the conversation is not necessarily to change anyone’s mind, not necessarily to change anyone’s convictions.

Caroline Mehl: It’s really at its core about fostering mutual understanding. How can we better understand where others are coming from despite our deep differences? And how can we do so in a way that is respectful, that is saying, I have these deeply held beliefs. You have your deeply held beliefs. I don’t need to hate you because of that.

Caroline Mehl: And we can move towards mutual understanding rather than focusing on what typically happens in difficult conversations, which is either. People tend to go into fight, flight, or freeze mode. Where fight is, you go on the offensive, you’re just trying to prove your point show you the person why they’re wrong, try to get them to change their mind.

Caroline Mehl: Freeze is you just kind of clam up and you don’t wanna engage in flea is you just try to get outta the conversation. So constructive dialogue is really about how do you engage, how do you stay in the conversation in a meaningful way where the goal is not to convince the other person to change their mind.

Cyndi Burnett: I think this really goes closely with the concept of keeping open in the field of creativity, because when you want someone to be more creative, you want them to keep open, and I think in having these constructive dialogues, based on what you just said, you really need to keep open to diverse perspectives in order to move forward together and to collaborate together.

Cyndi Burnett: Is that correct? Absolutely open-mindedness, curiosity, which again are core components of creativity are so essential to this work. It, it was curious that you, it was curious that you referenced curiosity because that also struck me. You know, I I think there are some people , that are naturally curious.

Matthew Worwood: They have an intellectual curiosity. I have a position on guns, for example, and I was curious to better understand. Why other people had an opposing view. So I would engage in conversations with the intention to better understand that viewpoint. But I have to be honest with you, if I didn’t have that natural curiosity to better understand why people value the the other position, then.

Matthew Worwood: I don’t know if I would engage in the conversation. So out of cur, out of curiosity, you share with us how, because I get that’s the mindset piece. How do you get students to get curious about things they’re not curious about and engage in difficult conversations that they kind of perhaps don’t wanna do?

Caroline Mehl: It’s challenging, you can’t force someone to be curious about something that they’re not curious. You can’t force them to have these conversations. I think that’s part of it, is just acknowledging that you can’t force this. But if, if students are in an academic environment.

Caroline Mehl: Part of it is that , they need to be there. So then how do you create the conditions so that there is more curiosity? And some of the things that you can do is try to create intrigue around something by highlighting, what’s a paradox here? What’s something that, just doesn’t quite add up to just get people to think about things in a new way.

Caroline Mehl: The other thing is. A lot of these conversations, these hyperpolarized conversations, whether it’s about gun control or anything else, they tend to fall into these binaries where they’re two sides. These are the two sides. And again, there’s very little curiosity because it feels so simplistic, but in reality, almost all issues are far more complex than we tend to think, and the common talking points are.

Caroline Mehl: And so the more that you inject complexity into the at hand. There is for curiosity because you’re suddenly saying, you’re suddenly showing, oh, there’s, there’s a lot more here than we tend to think. And even inviting students into conversations by asking them what part of this topic are you feeling uncertain about?

Caroline Mehl: Are you feeling conflicted about just naming that type of uncertainty, making space for it. Just, again, it shows the nuance in how people think about these issues opens up the complexity about these issues. So. As a very practical example, an exercise that we do is something that’s known as the illusion of explanatory depth.

Caroline Mehl: And so the whole idea there is that in general there’s this kind of cognitive bias where it’s called the illusion of explanatory depth, where we tend to believe that we know a lot more about something than we do. And then when you ask to explain it. You realize, oh, I don’t know anything about this.

Caroline Mehl: Right? So if you ask people like very basic things like how does the internet work? How does a fax machine work? You know, people actually have no idea. And then you say, explain it in detail step by step. And so when you ask people that, it humbles ’em because they realize, oh, I don’t know that much about something.

Caroline Mehl: And the research has been shown to apply to. Highly polarized issues where people have very strong opinions, but oftentimes they that much about it or they really haven’t thought through it and asking them those tough question. Well, tell me in practice, how would you solve this problem? And then you start to infuse and it rejects some of the complexity around it.

Caroline Mehl: Like, well, what about this piece of the policy? And again, it just makes the conversation a lot richer and a lot more nuanced because it’s getting people to move beyond the simple. The strong feelings towards thinking about some of these complexities that they maybe hadn’t considered before.

Cyndi Burnett: So Caroline, I’m currently mentoring a group of high school young women, and I was recently speaking with them and I said, what are the challenges you’re facing right now in high school? And the biggest one they mentioned was, and it was across the board, was I don’t feel comfortable talking to everyone at school.

Cyndi Burnett: There are differences and there are labels, and sometimes you feel like you can’t even say hello to someone without there being some sort of strong reaction. So I know you primarily work with higher ed and also high school, but what advice would you give to teachers out there listening that say, I want to start the conversation.

Cyndi Burnett: What are some strategies , that you might use or employ so that you can start to have those conversations, those constructive dialogues?

Matthew Worwood: And I just wanna quickly add to that as well, from the teacher’s perspective, knowing that the teacher may also not feel comfortable because of the current climate, facilitating that conversation as well.

Caroline Mehl: Yeah, this is a real challenge and what you’re naming Matthew about the double challenge of , the person who’s supposed to, you know, be confident and know what to do mm-hmm. Often doesn’t in these environments makes it a lot more difficult. So there are a few practices that I would suggest. So, when you’re thinking about the classroom, you can think about both the environment.

Caroline Mehl: As well as how are you as the educator showing up and modeling? And then also how are you teaching both implicitly and explicitly about these topics? So thinking about the environment, one thing to recognize is if the environment is not suitable to support these types of conversations, it’s not gonna go well, right?

Caroline Mehl: If there isn’t a degree of trust and rapport between people you can’t expect them to start having these incredibly difficult conversations and for it to. Go smoothly. And so having educators be proactive about thinking about what is the environment they’re creating in their classroom? How are they beginning, you know, don’t begin with the conversation about the most polarized topic.

Caroline Mehl: Begin with some just basic exercises over time to, again, build a sense of trust and community in the classroom. Because the more that students feel like they have a basis of trust and a relationship with others, and they see each other as like fully see their full humanity, it’s a really rich way to move forward because when they encounter a conflict, they can go back and say, oh, well I know this person.

Caroline Mehl: They’re a good person. I might not agree with them, but I’ve had some really good experiences. I get where they’re coming from. So I would begin first by just doing. Basic exercises in the classroom to invite students to share about themselves, what they care about, where they come from, what’s important to them, so that they’re starting to just build relationships of like who they’re as individuals in a meaningful three dimensional way.

Caroline Mehl: The second piece in terms of the environment is how are you creating the just norms and expectations and agreements within the classroom that will. Conversation up for success. So again, if you have no expectations set in the classroom, what is acceptable behavior, what does what do it hard to. To have these conversations, both because one students feel uncomfortable, they don’t know what’s gonna happen, they dunno what’s expected of them.

Caroline Mehl: And if something starts to go sideways, you don’t have anything to point to to say, oh, you know what, this is actually inappropriate. So being proactive by establishing those types of classroom norms and expectations is really, really powerful for helping starts. In as, as an educator, especially Matthew as you’re saying, a lot of people are feeling uncomfortable being able to point to what has been explicitly agreed upon as a, oh hey, you know, we said that we would behave an x, y, Z way and this is deviating from that.

Caroline Mehl: I’m gonna invite us to return to, that can just be a very helpful facilitation exercise. What we often recommend is that you don’t impose these norms and agreements. It’s actually in part of the trust building in the classroom that it’s collaborative. So you can ask questions to your students, like, think about a time or a place where you felt like you could truly express yourself openly without fear of judgment or retaliation.

Caroline Mehl: What were the conditions that allowed you to feel that way? So then you invite students to really think about, you know, what do I need the space to look like? How do I need people to behave? And, discuss that together. You say, okay, what’s missing from this? What else would you need to fully in conversation?

Caroline Mehl: In this classroom. So that’s a lot about the environment. The modeling is again, how can you as an instructor show up by, modeling curiosity, modeling, intellectually humility, modeling, openness to views that just,, that go against what you believe. And then in terms of the teaching.

Caroline Mehl: Spending time to explicitly teach your students skills, like active listening, asking constructive questions things like that. But then also thinking about how to infuse this into your pedagogical practice. So, you know, thinking about structuring classroom exercises where students are engaging in role play, where, there’s a complicated topic and different students have to.

Caroline Mehl: So, again, going back to kind of an example that you gave earlier, Matthew, around gun control and what I was talking about, about like how people simplify and think about binaries. If you take a complex topic and then you think about who are all the different stakeholders who are impacted, we don’t often think about all the stakeholders you might think about,

Caroline Mehl: one person from the, stereotypical other side. But if you, let’s say, take an issue and then you assign students roles where you’re this person in this situation, you’re this person, in this situation, everyone is impacted in a different way. And you ask them, role play this situation it, it gets ’em to inhabit a different perspective, a different point of view.

Caroline Mehl: Gets them to. Inhabit maybe a view that they don’t agree with, which can open up the space to have these types of conversations. But those types of, just creative exercises can again, make space for these types of conversations..

Cyndi Burnett: I think vulnerability also plays a big part in it because you feel vulnerable even opening the door to those conversations because you don’t know what’s gonna happen.

Cyndi Burnett: So I, I have a question that sort of builds on what Matt just said around this vulnerability and this. Approach really hard topics because, , it’s one thing to debate. Like I think Buffalo has the pizza in the world maybe better than Italy. Sorry, Matt. And I say, sorry, Matt, because we’ve debated over that before, but I, I really think, ,

Matthew Worwood: and I’m practicing my listening skills right now because I had urge to respond, so I’m gonna listen and be open to the possibility that it does.

Cyndi Burnett: Right. And, and you can do that because it’s just pizza, right? But when you start talking about things that. That really go against people’s value sets. I think it’s a whole nother story. So, especially with the polarization of what’s happening politically right now, I’m constantly reading about, that goes against, who I am as a person.

Cyndi Burnett: And so when you’re dealing with these really emotionally charged conversations particularly in the classroom how do you manage those? How do you manage the emotions that come with these kind of conversations?

Caroline Mehl: Yeah, that’s a great question and definitely the trickiest piece. So, well, we offer a, an online learning program called Perspectives that is geared towards students, and it essentially teaches students key concepts from psychology to better understand how the mind works, how we process information, where our differences come from, and how to navigate difficult conversations more effectively.

Caroline Mehl: So that is our, you know. To teach students these skills and also prepare them for these types of conversations. So that is something that is a useful tool to again, create a shared language, shared set of skills for educators for. Having these types of conversations if you’re not able to do that.

Caroline Mehl: Because not everyone is there again are conditions that you can set in your classroom and, and tools that you can use to try to set up conversations for success. And so building off of what I was saying earlier about, again, really ensuring don’t. Start, obviously most people wouldn’t do this, but I wouldn’t recommend starting, you know, day one of your first class and jumping into some of those polarized topics.

Caroline Mehl: It’s just probably not gonna go well. So just kind of recognizing how are you matching the, the kind of intensity or the sensitivity of the topic that you are addressing with the state of where your classroom is. Have you spent enough time together as a class where you have a sense of trust?

Caroline Mehl: If not, wait, wait until you’ve built that trust first. Have you established those types of norms? But then beyond that really a few things that I’d mentioned. So one is grounding conversations in storytelling. So very often when conversations. Start to go sideways around these highly polarized sensitive topics.

Caroline Mehl: It’s because we’re all mentioning emotions, right? We have high emotions, we feel strong leads. It’s going against my, you know, core beliefs, my moral framework, whatever it might be. So just recognizing that, right? Remembering that we are human beings, our emotions are playing a very strong role in these types of conversations.

Caroline Mehl: Don’t. Don’t paper over that and make space for it. Because oftentimes what tends to go wrong is that these conversations become these zero sum battles where either I win and you lose or vice versa. And so the conversations start to fall into what we think of as a warrior mindset where you are entering the conversation, not with the goal of listening or learning, but the goal of winning the battle and defeating the other side.

Caroline Mehl: And when you have conversations like that. It’s very unlikely to be productive and it doesn’t feel good, right? Because it’s actually alerting the other person to, oh, this person is attacking me. I’m gonna go on the defensive around my views and go on the offensive to prove why they’re wrong. So you don’t make much progress.

Caroline Mehl: You’re not really listening, you’re not really learning. And so instead we talk about letting go of winning and shifting to what we refer to as an mindset, going back to curiosity. And so, you referred to earlier, like, what are the mindsets? The mindsets that we talk about are open-mindedness, curiosity, intellectual humility.

Caroline Mehl: And so really again trying to move away from these just, these are my facts. These are your facts to. What is the why behind why you believe what you believe and why you feel so strongly about what you believe. If you don’t make sense space for that, these conversations can just kind of explode because people are carrying that, but they don’t understand, why do you feel so strongly and so grounding these conversations in storytelling where you’re, obviously facts and figures are critically important, but how are you again, inviting students to share.

Caroline Mehl: What are their motivations for why.

Caroline Mehl: Again, as I was saying earlier, trying to infuse curiosity and complexity into the way that you’re structuring the conversation. But if, if you start to find that the conversation is getting very heated, it’s kind of move beyond where you want it to go. There are also a set of practices that can help you, regain control of the situation, get things back on track.

Caroline Mehl: And so a few specific practices are one, you as the instructor can ask questions of. Or the people who are like really, getting into some kind of conflict. But again, that invite them to engage in personal storytelling. So, asking them to share more about, can you tell me about when this became something that was so important to you and why?

Caroline Mehl: Or can you say more about what you mean when you say, X, y, z? Just, asking, opening, opening up space, asking questions can help just make space for understanding, another technique is naming the values and the feelings that you’re hearing in the room. So, just, naming, just acknowledging, , I’m hearing a lot of frustration in the room, is that right?

Caroline Mehl: Just naming it can help people kind of relieve some of that tension and move forward. Or naming, like I hear a lot of people are caring care a lot about, personal freedom or whatever it might be. Just kind of putting labels on what people are saying in a way that people can organize their thinking and move forward.

Caroline Mehl: And then if things are like, again, truly starting to feel like , they’re not going well you can what we call it shift gears. So essentially like how do you slow things down and redirect and so there are techniques that you can use like just simply pausing. Again, people are often afraid to pause is very valuable, right?

Caroline Mehl: It’s totally legitimate to say things are feeling really. Let’s just all take a moment. Let’s take a breath, let’s regain our composure. And just giving people a space to take some deep breaths together and slow things down. You can reframe how students are engaging. If it’s been a big group discussion and things are, , getting outta control and say, okay, we’re gonna, we’re gonna break up into pairs or small groups and you can create more.

Caroline Mehl: Essentially a container around how students are engaging. So you’ll say, we’re gonna, we’re gonna have a time to go around where each student is gonna take turns, one at a time, sharing their perspective, sharing their, , story. And you’ll have two minutes and when it’s your turn, you share yours.

Caroline Mehl: And so just creating that, those boundaries can be really helpful because when things feel out of hand, it’s often because things are spilling out and there’s no way to contain it. And so creating some of those constraints can be very helpful.

Matthew Worwood: I just wanna do some, making some connections and then finish with a kind of add on to that one. We just had a conversation around handwriting the importance of handwriting because it allows you to get your thoughts quickly out on paper. And it seems to me when you’re in large conversation, sometimes you’re like, I need to blurt it out because I’m worried I’m gonna forget it.

Matthew Worwood: And so. It’s almost like maybe there’s opportunities for people to have notebooks. They can kind of write down what they wanna say. And even if they don’t get to say it, they feel like it’s been expressed and articulated in some way. But then I’m also realizing that, I thinking about our future creative book that’s coming out, initiate discussions.

Matthew Worwood: This is. A big part of that. But then we’ve also got the importance of face the feelings, which I can hear we’re talking about. You know, as Cindy referenced, this is really hard topics. It’s gonna evoke a lot of emotion and we might have to sometimes push through those feelings.

Matthew Worwood: And of course, to do that, we need to have strong relationships. And my follow up is that I feel that. One of the challenges that we face in today’s world, or at least in today’s classrooms, is we’re gonna go and engage in these difficult conversations and we’re articulating what’s in our mind. It’s possible that as we express our view, and if someone has a completely different view, we may offend them and we may accidentally offend them, and.

Matthew Worwood: My question is my students, I think to a certain extent, sometimes feel crippled to express what’s in their thoughts because they’re so worried about offending. But I think the flip side of it’s, we have to be mindful that if, because of the world we live in a democracy, we are sometimes going to get offended.

Matthew Worwood: And being offended isn’t always, oh, that person’s bad.

Caroline Mehl: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting in this question of being offended. It’s so subjective, right? Did someone say something offensive? Are you being offended? Like maybe someone said something that’s, perfectly polite and kind and it’s about their core convictions, but it offended your moral sensibilities.

Caroline Mehl: Was the person in the wrong for, describing what they believe. That’s completely subjective. So it’s very tricky and I think that, again, it goes back to those norms and expectations of establishing Yeah, we’re having, we’re gonna have some difficult conversations in, today’s conversation.

Caroline Mehl: Maybe you’ll hear something that might feel offensive. How should we respond? We should, should we give each other the benefit of the doubt? Should we respond with curiosity first, judgment later, right? So you might initially feel. Offended. But rather than jumping to a conclusion, maybe if you ask follow up questions to better understand where they’re coming from, maybe your offense would go away.

Caroline Mehl: Maybe you’d say, oh, maybe I misunderstood. Or again, just by understanding people’s perspectives more your views might change. Something that I often think about in this work is. People, when we think cross-culturally, internationally, we recognize that people have very, very, very different cultures and traditions and ways of thinking.

Caroline Mehl: But we’re often, you know, pretty generous around that. Like, we’ll say, oh, okay. It’s a completely different culture and tradition. And so the way that they think, the way that they act, they’re rituals, they’re so foreign into me, but I’m not gonna impose my judgment on it because it’s different and I don’t see that type of, generosity being exercised within our own country. But we still have that diversity, right? That diversity of background, diversity of cultures, the diversity that’s leading people to have, again, very different practices, very different values, very different views, very different beliefs. And so just again, encouraging people to come with that level of curiosity of.

Caroline Mehl: Be so quick to be offended, respond with curiosity first, and try to withhold judgment. Where’s this person coming from? If I had been raised in this circumstance, might I have felt differently? I think what they think, just. Just pausing, just pausing to, , question your own reactions and assumptions can be really powerful.

Caroline Mehl: And in moving through that so that you can reserve some of that judgment around the, and say, first.

Cyndi Burnett: So Caroline, you co-founded CDI in 2017. How have things shifted over the last nine years in the work? Are you seeing more. Progression in a positive way or in a negative way?

Caroline Mehl: It’s a complicated question, and I’d say a little bit of both. The one thing that I’ve been reflecting on is that when we first began polarization was something that felt really new and really.

Caroline Mehl: Surprising and strange. I remember having conversations where people would say, oh, I’m having this trouble, this issue too, like in my classroom, in my community with my family. And it was this kind of feeling of surprise and also like, oh, you’re experiencing this too. That’s so weird.

Caroline Mehl: Things feel so different right now. And now we’re so jaded. Right? Like, almost a decade later we are just assuming, oh, of course. Are incredibly polarized. Of course, you can’t have these conversations. Of course, nothing’s getting done, ? You know, in Congress. So I think that’s been one major change that we’ve just become normalized around the state of polarization, which is a little bit dangerous because when we think this is just how things always are and will always be you start to forget what is possible.

Caroline Mehl: But what I will also say on a more positive note is that in the past years especially, I have seen a lot of progress on this issue in the sense that. Again, in the early years it felt like people were still wrapping their minds around the fact that this an issue it and just. From my own perspective leading this organization, we’ve been growing dramatically year over year, over the last three years in particular.

Caroline Mehl: And it speaks to, again, the rising demand for this work. People are really eager to work on this, to solve this problem. And so I find that very encouraging. There’s also so much research that’s been coming out over the last few years. A lot of it is from the nonprofit research organization called More in Common that has demonstrated that the vast majority of Americans.

Caroline Mehl: Are really dissatisfied with the current state of, our society, and, they have this term that they call the exhausted majority. So two thirds of Americans are part of this exhausted majority that are kind of fed up with how things are, want us to be able to, collaborate across differences to make compromises in the face of solving our shared problems.

Caroline Mehl: And so I’m seeing both from the data and from. My own experience on the ground that there is a real hunger for making progress on this issue. In students, faculty, educators. They wanna have these meaningful conversations. They wanna be able to connect with their classmates, with their peers. And so I think that is very encouraging.

Matthew Worwood: You referenced something really early on about when we start talking, we realize that actually perhaps we dunno as much. As we thought we did, and I’m just thinking from an educator perspective, certainly the best one is the pandemic, right? Everyone suddenly knows everything about pandemics and how germs are passed, and you know that was, that, that was a great example of how we suddenly had all these scientists that suddenly emerged from six years old to 60 years old and.

Matthew Worwood: I’m just curious, is there a danger in sometimes having conversations about difficult topics when actually both sides of the debate within your classroom, they might actually lack enough knowledge to debate? And if you do think that’s possible, is it a case of engaging in, in some scholarship before engaging the conversation?

Matthew Worwood: I’m just curious how we kind of like, that piece fits in.

Caroline Mehl: That’s a great question. And I think that is absolutely part of the issue that students are lacking so much information, right? And we know more and more that students are getting their information from, TikTok.

Caroline Mehl: So obviously they’re missing a lot. So I do think it’s important as an educator to play that role of being informed about the topic in advance being intentional about. Understanding both sides, understanding the evidence from both sides. And so yeah, I think that is really important. And again, I would say the evidence is important and also the core beliefs underpinning people’s experiences and views are also important.

Caroline Mehl: So surfacing that. Surfacing why, what is, what’s, what is it that’s driving you to feel so strongly, especially if they don’t have, that’s important.

Caroline Mehl: Why do you feel so strongly if you don’t seem to know that much about it? Like even just exploring that you don’t necessarily need to have all the facts, but just even surfacing that there are gaps here, but you still have strong convictions where the, let’s investigate.

Cyndi Burnett: I love that this has been such an interesting conversation.

Cyndi Burnett: Caroline. We do have to wrap up, so I do wanna make sure we get time to ask our question that we ask all of our guests, which is, can you tell us about the most creative educational experience and the impact it had on you?

Caroline Mehl: Sure. So I would say that. In my early twenties, I actually got on a little bit of a creativity kick where I was really interested in studying creativity.

Caroline Mehl: And I think it was a book by Tina Sig that probably had the most impact on me. I read multiple of her books, but it really sparked in me just understanding what creativity was all about. Applying creativity to the way I was thinking about my life. And it was around that time that I started to come up with the idea that became the Constructive Dialogue Institute where

Caroline Mehl: I was curious about solving problems in the world. Doing so in a way that was, again, creative and original and that whole way of thinking. And a lot of her work and research really inspired me to pursue this work.

Matthew Worwood: Well, Caroline, thank you so much and I’m just gonna leave it there because there’s so much more.

Matthew Worwood: I wish we could go on for another hour talking about this. If you’re listening and you wanna learn more about Caroline’s work, please visit the Constructive Dialogue Institute and explore the resources they offer for educators and leaders. . Please share it with a co colleague who you think cares a lot about.

Matthew Worwood: Inquiry and at least has the opportunity to facilitate what is so important dialogue. Don’t forget to make sure to subscribe to our Fueling Creativity in Education Podcast newsletter, and we will look forward to seeing you in our next episode. My name’s Dr. Matthew Ward.

Cyndi Burnett: And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Cyndi Burnett: This episode was produced by Cindy Burnett and Matthew War. Our podcast assistant is Anne Fernando, and our editor is Sheik Ahmed.