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Leading Controversial Conversations: Facilitating Productive Dialogue

Facilitating Productive Dialogue

Register here through the Center for Faculty Excellence

This semester, the Center for Faculty Excellence and the Program for Public Discourse invite UNC faculty to participate in a series of three workshops designed to empower educators across the curriculum with the necessary tools to facilitate robust discourse across controversial terrain.


Join us for this workshop focused on facilitation techniques for engaging students in civil and honest discussion in the classroom. We will discuss strategies for establishing a shared context for conversation, offering multiple modes of participation, challenging dominant narratives, and addressing microaggressions.

Date: February 15, 2022
Times: 03:00 pm – 04:15 pm
Audience: UNC Faculty
Venue: Center for Faculty Excellence, Online
Facilitating Productive Dialogue

Event Moderator

Kevin Marinelli serves as Executive Director of the Program for Public Discourse and teaches in the Department of Communication. He teaches courses in rhetorical studies, and his scholarship centers on public argument. He has published essays in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and Argumentation and Advocacy, including his most recent essay on the emergence of Black Lives Matter. Kevin also leads the Agora Fellows, a group of undergraduate students committed to the study and practice of public discourse in contemporary democracy. Currently, Kevin is investigating practices of rhetorical citizenship.
Facilitating Productive Dialogue
Emily Boehm is a PPD Faculty Affiliate and an educational developer and evolutionary biologist working with faculty members to bring active and inclusive learning methods to their classrooms, leading the CFE’s initiatives for faculty new to UNC. She also serves as the co-facilitator for the Faculty Administrator Development Program.