Navigating Disagreement Successfully

Disagreeing Well: a skill for everyone

Diverse communities can hold diverse opinions and still coexist happily. As a society, we can have free speech, reasoned dialogue and diversity of thought if we learn to disagree well. Encouraging this kind of respectful, attentive debate has always been one of the key roles of the nation’s universities, which is one of the reasons that University College London (UCL) has launched its Disagreeing Well programme, an initiative designed to promote the kind of careful listening and thoughtful dialogue that enables all of us to challenge our assumptions and open up our minds to new perspectives. Having the tools, techniques and platforms to do so is a vital part of how UCL is supporting both its own internal communities of staff and students in practising this. UCL also offers free-to-all public resources on the topic. Here you can find the Disagreeing Well Skills Series of short videos designed to help you develop good conversational practices, hosted by international conflict mediator and UCL alumna, Mia Forbes Pirie. Staff and students across the university have been thinking carefully about how to learn to disagree well and promote these skills in our classrooms. Teaching difficult and sensitive topics can be incredibly productive and engaging, but we need to plan carefully when strong emotions might enter the classroom. We have designed professional development opportunities for staff to reflect on the creation of inclusive and psychologically safe classrooms wherever possible, especially when disagreement is a likely outcome in a teaching session or module.

UCL encourages students to have experiences of learning about difficult and sensitive topics. This offers interesting opportunities to learn more about different world views and develop inclusive communication skills. Through our ChangeMakers initiative or Extended Learning Opportunities programme, we are offering supported opportunities for students to collaborate with staff and with each other, learning how to disagree well and to think about productive learning outcomes where consensus is not always possible. An example of this launching in July is a podcast series on how to disagree well in collaboration with the Students’ Union UCL Impartial Chairs programme. Students have given feedback that they enjoy learning about topics that could be described as difficult or sensitive and particularly in the case of the Eugenics Legacy and Education Project, students see the value of the university community continuing to grapple with topics that are uncomfortable and challenging together.

HELEN KNOWLER Associate Professor and Academic Lead for UCL’s Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) www.ucl.ac.uk/about/disagreeing-well

CLICK HERE to listen to our Education Corner Podcast with Lara Choksey, Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature at UCL

CLICK HERE to listen to our Education Corner Podcast with Professor John Mullan, Head of the Department of English at UCL