Piecing the community together

Representatives from various cultural organizations came out to support the new Multicultural Center-Centro Multicultural's opening. Photo by Steven Lawton

Student diversity and inclusion will be on top of the UNLV agenda in the coming months.

The department of special education, along with the office of the vice president for diversity and inclusion are offering a program to run from March 2 to April 27 in the new Multicultural Center, to creates dialogue between groups that have historically been in conflict.

The program is divided into four sessions, which will include dialogue about issues regarding race, gender, sexual orientation and religion.
“The purpose of intergroup dialogue is to enable its participants to develop comfort with, and skill for, discourse on difficult topics toward the end of fostering positive, meaningful and sustained cross-group relationships,” said Christine Clark, UNLV vice president for diversity and inclusion. 
“Intergroup dialogue is a collaboratively structured form of group conversation characterized by participants’ willingness to listen for understanding,” Clark explained. ”It is different from discussion, where participants generally engage in serial monologuing – each offering their perspective on a given topic – as well as from debate, where participants typically learn to listen to gain advantage, each seeking to trump the perspectives offered by others on a given topic.”

The eight-week long program is aimed at reaching out to undergraduate students, who will each receive one credit for participating in the dialogues, but will also involve graduate students, professional staff and faculty as facilitators.
The success of the program depends on the level of participation by members of the UNLV community, as “the goal of intergroup dialogue is for participants in it to build increased intra- and cross-group awareness, knowledge and understanding leading to collective engagement in action for social justice, [eradicating] the history of tension or conflict between the groups brought together in the dialogue,” Clark said.

The dialogues bring interested students together to collaborate on controversial issues, and  provide experienced staff an opportunity to share their enthusiasm with students and learn about how and what they think.

As a co-facilitator in the discussions about racial issues, diversity programming specialist Anna Smedley thinks “it is important for us to be aware of how our racial [and] ethnic identities impact us as individuals…our communities and our country.”

“I am also a firm believer in the value of diversity,” Smedley said, “and see dialogue as way to engage other folks in the appreciation of diversity on all levels.”

Christina Hernandez, outreach and awareness coordinator and a co-facilitator for gender discussions, became involved with the intergroup dialogue program because she believes “it is important to have conversations to build [an] alliance between women and men.”

“Being different from one another is a good thing,” she added.
Clark said that programs like this are necessary on campus because it has been found that students experience diversity differently and that diversity programming on campus should incorporate students’ opinions and address them in an academic environment.

Clark added that emphasizing diversity is not beneficial to only one group of students. In fact,  research proves that students “who are educated in robustly diverse educational settings do better academically, are more likely to graduate and are more likely to be hired first, promoted faster and earn more money sooner than their peers who are educated in racially [and] ethnically homogenous institutions.”