Convenings

Past Learning Exchange Reports:
Seattle, May 3–5, 2002

Breaking Conventions Discussion Group: Town Hall Forum

At the very end of the dialogue period, a young boy publicly asked the scientists:  What does it mean to be human?  The facilitator chose to close the event with that question hanging in the air.  A discussion of that choice opens the debrief ...     

Discussion
Norman:  The young man whose question was not dignified ... We had the opportunity to offer him dignity, and his question was left unanswered, which I found horrifying.

Heather:  I couched it as our last question/comment, and it was such a huge question that, to me, to answer him would have been to demean it.  That was the whole overarching question of the discussion.  The adult with him told me that it made his day.

Michael W:  Dialogue is in process.  My experience with youth is that if they are in an environment that they are not normally in, they are brought there by an adult or an organization working with youth.  Even the posing of a question is part of the dialogic process.

Sandy:  What about the opportunity for him to answer his own question?

Valerie:  So much of it is mechanical, and it seemed like time was up once I was really loosened up and got comfortable.  But I don’t think people would have felt comfortable staying longer or coming back tomorrow.

Norman:  I felt like everyone else got a response and he didn’t.  I felt he was cut off, and that didn’t honor his question and take it seriously.

Liz:  I think the power of dialogue is that it takes you to another place.  I would have liked to have heard the scientists answer both of the questions the young man asked and I think it would have moved the scientists off the dime, too.

Andrea:  I think there’s two different assumptions operating here—the adult’s and the child’s:  one that the question is abstract and unanswerable, the other that it’s a perfectly concrete, answerable question.

Carole:  I disagree with that.

Norman:  It was also about the social construction of the dialogue.

Pat:  What does it mean that we’re spending so much time talking about this?  What about our own responses to the topic of the discussion?  Are we avoiding something?

Elise:  I think it’s about process, not about not being able to talk about the content.

Valerie:  I feel uncomfortable with the ramifications of this work, one of which is potential genocide.  And I am dismayed when people of color are not in the audience at things like this.

Don:  One thing that’s been on my mind is people’s focus on enabling dialogue.  I felt that, on one level, I would have liked to have been aided by a sharpening of focus on what these scientists should respond to.  This environment was not a dialogue like the one you could have with the person sitting next to you, real give and take.  You have to keep in mind the possibilities and limitations of the space and the event.

Valerie:  There was a hierarchy established when the experts were introduced, but how do you avoid that?

Lisa:  We also have to honor times when expertise that is extraordinary is available to us.  I’m satisfied not having a dialogue if I can hear what the issues are.  There was an air of possibility upstairs that was so extraordinary.

Felicia:  One of the challenges for me is speaking from your own experience, more often I find it challenging not to speak for my “group.”  I feel like I need to speak for others who don’t have the privilege to be here.  I struggle with this model that tells me you’re alone when I don’t think we’re alone.

Elise:  I concur with Lisa—it’s nice to be able to hear from experts when you have them.  I had a question that didn’t get answered in the discussion, and I had trouble with the approach taken upstairs.

Abel:  We’ve been talking about the internal dialogue that happens when you stand in front of a work of art:  Is the experience upstairs similar to that.

Bill:  I didn’t mind the two experts having more time to speak, but I wished there was an artist on the stage speaking as well.  I think it would work better if the speakers stand in more for people in the crowd—to have the dialogue that people in the audience want to have.

Don:  I would have liked to have a critic/ethicist on the panel to speak to that aspect, to harness some of the feeling that would inevitably be in the audience. 

Elise:  I think it’s about objectives.  We need to be mindful of our objectives, because different objectives are reached through different processes.

Susan:  Cumulatively, through this entire experience of yesterday and today, I feel like I’m getting more questions, more issues, more concerns, and more sense of ownership.  It’s very valuable.  You can’t have everything all in one place, but you can have many parts that add up.