Collective Dialogues Event
What is the Collective Dialogues event?
It is a co-curricular opportunity for students to develop critical thinking skills, sharpen communication skills and forge connections across curricular and co-curricular experiences.
Faculty members propose and facilitate topics for discussion. Students are assigned to topics based on their major for a rich discussion with their peers and Honors staff and faculty.
Why is it important?
Honors students have long valued connections with faculty. Feedback from students tells us that forging these connections to faculty in their major early in their college journey enriches their BGSU experience tremendously.
How can you help?
We ask for faculty support facilitating a Collective Dialogues session with a small group of first-year students in your discipline for one hour.
Our hope is to provide first-year Honors students with important and reinforcing messages from deans, faculty and advisors and model some of our expectations for them as learners through this discussion.
During this session students would have the opportunity to talk about a current or ethical dilemma facing the faculty member’s area of study. This helps position the student’s undergraduate education within the context of the broader world. It will not be reasonable to expect that students will have done any homework before Intro to Honors, so the conversation would need to be “self-contained” within this one-hour session.
For further details about Collective Dialogues, contact Shawna Babula, Honors Learning Community coordinator, at sbabula@bgsu.edu or Honors College Associate Dean Jodi Devine at jdevine@bgsu.edu.
2024 Collective Dialogues Schedule
Session 1: 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., Olscamp 101
Session 2: 12:30-1:45 p.m., Olscamp 101
Logistics
10-15 minutes – students grab lunch
5 minutes – welcome from Honors College
55 minutes – conversations
5-minute warning
Note that sessions must end on time because all students have additional sessions to attend after their Collective Dialogues experience.
Faculty frequently asked questions
Faculty should plan to arrive about 15 minutes before the session starts to get their lunch and get settled.
We will print temporary name tags for faculty who do not bring their BGSU name tag.
Each session is 75 minutes. This allows for 15 minutes of transition/buffer time and about a 60-minute conversation. Students will be eating their lunches during the conversation.
The Honors College will send all faculty facilitators the list of students at their table roughly a week before the event. If you have students at your table with majors outside of the courses you usually teach, we recommend selecting a broad topic that would include multiple academic interests. You are welcome to take inspiration from the topics listed below. Such topics may relate to current events, pop culture/media, creating a college experience you hope for, making the best of your first year at BGSU, etc.
Students will not have done any prior readings or engagement with materials before their Collective Dialogues experience. Keep this in mind as you select and introduce a topic.
Students will not have done any prior reading or know their topic before Collective Dialogues. Additional readings, materials, handouts or multimedia presentations are not necessary. We encourage you to use your time to have an in-the-moment, organic conversation about your selected topic.
Past discussion topics
- War and Politics in Star Wars: How fiction can carry powerful messages about corruption, misinformation, and standing up for others
- Drunkorexia and it's impacts on college student's well-being
- The Life You Can Save: Do We Have a Duty to Help the World's Poor?
- The Last of the Ancient Sunlight: A Long View of our Dependence on Carbon-based Energy
- The Importance of Representation Everywhere: LGBTQ+ Characters in Fantasy and Sci-Fi Media
- Is the Criminal Justice System Broken or Doing What it Was Designed to Do?
- Finally the Main Character: Modern Portrayals of Autism and Their Impact on Pop Culture
- Lions and Lambs: Examining Representation in “The Twilight Saga”
- The Lesbian Manifesto: The Google Doc That Took Tiktok by Storm and its Analysis of Compulsory Heterosexuality in Modern Day
- Nom de Plume: Cultural Appropriation and Identity Theft in Classical Music Publishing
Updated: 09/16/2024 03:08PM