ENVX Symposium Blog

Participants in March 19 ENVX facilitator training, Lewis & Clark campus.On March 19th, Lewis & Clark students and faculty took an evening to engage and prepare for future ENVX Symposium dialogues. A goal of our symposium is to foster engagement with teeth, using structured dialogue as the vehicle to do so. Showcasing our Lewis & Clark community, we will have students from the CAS and Graduate campuses act as facilitators to the structured, working group conversations. We’ve recruited students with training and background from Community Dialogues (CD), a long time partner of the Environmental Studies program.

To start the evening, all attendees shared pizza and refreshments, being urged to sit next to someone they didn’t know, to discuss the following prompt: “When was a time that you had to find common ground with someone?” Kicking off the training with food and this relevant conversation starter was a great way to lay a groundwork of trust between attendees.

ENVS faculty member Jessica Kleiss discussing situated approach questions with participant subgroup.Our first activity was led by CD representatives Janet Bixby and Clara Diakh. The attendees broke into two groups, and were guided through a CD structured dialogue that strove to build understanding rather than debate opinions, providing a model for how student facilitators may approach our ENVX working group conversations. The sessions began with a set of introductions, and proceeded with two questions relevant to the ENVX theme of land. An important piece of the structure was timing, with equal amounts of speaking time allocated to each dialogue participant, and intentional time taken between prompts and responses.

After the enriching experience of a CD dialogue, Professor Jim Proctor guided attendees through three key features of the ENVS program: Engagement, Asking Questions, and Situated Research. We strive to promote engagement by continually understanding difference as a set of puzzle pieces, able to fit together with mindful effort. We are particular and intentful in the way we ask questions, identifying them either Descriptive, Explanatory, Evaluative, or Instrumental. We situate our research in an Hourglass, first framing research broadly, second focusing it on a situated context, and finally zooming out to consider broader implications.

ENVS faculty member Liz Safran discussing situated hourglass with student participants.Our final activity again broke us out into groups, this time between our three working groups of the symposium: Cropland Agriculture, Livestock Agriculture, and Forestry. Each guided by a different ENVS faculty, the groups explored how we might apply the three key features of the ENVS department, as well as our earlier experience in the CD dialogue, to our future working group conversations.

This event was successful in briefing our student facilitators on the goals and intentions of our future working group conversations, and even gave our ENVX committee inspiration towards the structure of those events. We would like to extend our gratitude to Janet Bixy & Clara Daikh, the volunteer facilitators, and ENVS faculty for joining us and leaning into this engagement experiment.