The Dialogue Zone is a curricular and co-curricular initiative that builds capacity among students, staff, and faculty to learn and practice facilitated dialogue in order to address difficult issues that arise as we interact together in community. By creating space for multiple perspectives, cultivating listening skills, and promoting critical understanding, we foster a culture of dialogue. The Dialogue Zone reimagines conflict and challenging conversations as opportunities for learning and reflection that contribute to the common good.
Dialogue is an ambiguous term, one for which people have many different meanings. As the Dialogue Zone defines it, dialogue is “a communicative process in which people with different perspectives seek understanding.” However, dialogue does not always go smoothly, nor is it always easy.
In our national discourse, dialogue is often offered as a solution to misunderstandings, division, and conflict. Join us at for a two-and-a-half day institute to learn more about what dialogue is and how it differs from other ways of engaging people with diverse views. Strengthening your organization’s or community's capacity for dialogue can build understanding, inclusion, respect, cooperation, and belonging among members.
The Dialogue Zone offers a variety of programs and services that help students, faculty, and staff to engage in difficult conversations about critical topics facing the UD community and society as a whole. Through these efforts, we strive to promote a culture of understanding in a world that has become increasingly polarized and threatened by conflict.
Reserve our meeting space in Roesch Library Room 107 for your own dialogue-related programs and activities.
Partner with us in the development and delivery of dialogue-related activities and initiatives in the classroom or your student organization, department, unit, or community.
Meet with us to explore how we can support your group's or organization's efforts to engage in difficult conversations.
Our Story
The Dialogue Zone developed over a decade of dialogue-related efforts on the part of many individual staff and faculty members at the University. Now an independent organization operating under the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the Dialogue Zone hosts annually nearly 50 engagements with a combined total of over 1000 participants.
