A program encouraging dialogue helps students step outside their usual circles and navigate disagreement—without shutting one another out
Courageous Conversations participants Lena Dodoo, A26, and Sebastian Marchese, A29 Photo: Alonso Nichols
Sebastian Marchese sat face-to-face with a fellow student and, in two minutes, explained his beliefs about the death penalty. Then he rotated to a new partner and repeated the effort.
Around him, other Tufts students were moving through the same structured conversation exercise. The point was not to persuade or out-argue anyone; it was to give each student a chance to express an opinion, listen carefully to someone else do the same, and stay open long enough to understand where others were coming from.
For Marchese, A29, the experience became one of the most memorable moments of Courageous Conversations, a four-week Tufts dialogue program that brings students together to discuss difficult issues.
“I have strong feelings about the death penalty,” Marchese says, “and I know why I believe what I do. But when I listened to others explain their thinking, I saw that there was nuance in their ideas. Even if I disagreed with them, it was clear why people thought the way they did, and that allowed me to be more empathetic and to appreciate the complexity of their ideas.”
The emphasis on listening across disagreement is central to the program’s design. Open to undergraduate and graduate students from the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering, Courageous Conversations brings together cohorts of about 15 students who apply to take part in facilitated discussions and interactive exercises. While purposely avoiding debate, participants share their perspectives on politics, current events, campus issues, and philosophical questions.
In some sessions, students sit in a circle around a centerpiece filled with objects that serve as “talking pieces”: rocks, fidget toys, and other items on which participants have written their values. To speak, a student picks up one of the objects; they then share openly while other students only listen. Other sessions unfold through paired exchanges, small-group discussions, or exercises that ask students to place themselves along a spectrum in response to a question.
The goal is always the same: to help students speak honestly and listen with care.
The idea, says Ashley Rose Salomon, restorative practices program director in the Office of Student Life for the schools of Arts and Sciences and of Engineering, grew out of a question that kept surfacing in campus interactions: “How can we learn to disagree?”
“In a world shaped by algorithms, it’s easy to block someone from your echo chamber,” Salomon says. “When you’re in the same physical space with someone, that’s harder to do. You can’t just block them. You can choose not to listen to them—but you can also choose to courageously listen.”
That’s the idea driving the program, she explains: to bring students who might have opposing beliefs into the same room and give them tools to stay there.
Salomon didn’t know what level of interest to expect when Courageous Conversations launched in 2025. Ultimately, 66 students applied. One application statement in particular stayed with her: “I don’t want to cancel people, but that’s all I know how to do.” The comment, she felt, revealed a genuine hunger for new ways to navigate disagreement.
“No One Was Really Hearing Anyone Else”
Lena Dodoo, A26, felt that hunger herself. She first became interested in pursuing structured dialogue in Summer 2025, while working as a press intern in the office of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Even in a setting where many people shared similar politics and backgrounds, Dodoo says, something was missing. “We were all talking, but no one was really hearing anyone else,” she says.
The senior ultimately parlayed her work as a Civic Engagement Ambassador to help organize and participate in the inaugural Courageous Conversations cohort. The new program appealed to her as a way to practice something she says her generation urgently needs: “the ability to have meaningful conversations with people who might not think the same way you do.”
One exercise, Dodoo says, showed how such conversations can get started. In it, students physically placed themselves along a spectrum in response to the question of whether participants in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) should be able to buy junk food.
“It was easy to assume a particular person might hold a particular idea, just based on their appearance or what you thought you knew about them,” Dodoo says of the exercise. “But then you saw someone standing in a part of the spectrum where you didn’t expect them to be, and that piqued your curiosity. You want to know: ‘Why is that person there?’”
By the end of the cohort, Dodoo found herself approaching fellow participants on campus and striking up conversations with a new sense of ease, aware that she might never have met those peers if not for the program. “An invisible barrier had disappeared,” she says.
Marchese valued the program because it made disagreement feel less risky. A first-year student from Minnesota who takes his Orthodox Christian faith seriously, he appreciated being in a setting where people could speak openly about politics, religion, values, and community without turning every exchange into a contest.
“One of the reasons the group worked for me was that it created space for honest expression,” he says.
“It’s not about debate,” he adds. “It’s about seeing that the reasoning beneath a position is more important than the position itself. When you understand the childhood experience or religious belief or whatever that shapes people’s thinking, you appreciate their perspective more.”
For Salomon, the main goal of the program is encouraging that kind of appreciation, and she already sees two promising signs. During the program’s second iteration this spring, so many students applied that the organizers ran two separate cohorts; in the fall, they’re planning to run three.
Also, participants are beginning to carry the work beyond their cohorts. “Some students have started bringing the practices into their organizations, performance groups, and other campus spaces,” Salomon says. “They have a better understanding now of how to make discussions of all kinds more democratic.”
